On January 10th, 2020, I got a message on Alibaba from my table top manufacturer regarding the legs they just received. It turned out 25% of the legs were malfunctioning due to an issue with a small spring inside them that wasn’t locking them in position. I had anticipated things would not go perfectly but I never thought the legs would be the issue. They were an off-the-shelf product unlike the custom table top and bags I had designed.
This issue was time sensitive since Chinese New Year was fast approaching and factories in China would be shutdown for 2+ weeks. The last container ship leaving China I could get the product on was scheduled for January 16th. It would take 1 day to inspect and pack the product and 1 day to deliver the container to the port, meaning we needed replacements in 4 days. After lots of back and forth messages with both my manufacturers trying to get the problem resolved I accepted reality. The time crunch was too short. The replacements would have to wait until after Chinese New Year was over and the factories opened back up on February 2nd. I had been working on Diewood for about 3 years at this point so what was waiting a couple more weeks I thought.
A few weeks had passed and something began picking up steam in the news. Coronavirus.
The virus ended up shutting down factories in China for months. What I thought was going to be a February launch soon started looking like a March, then April, maybe May launch?
Eventually the factories opened back up, the replacement legs were received, container packed and loaded onto a ship. The tables were finally on the water. It was great to be able to focus my energy during this time into Diewood instead of reading the news 24/7 as the world was falling apart.
The plan was for the container ship to arrive in the port of Oakland, the container would then go through customs, be loaded onto a truck (all handled by Flexport), and delivered to a 3PL center operated by EasyPost just south of the port in San Leandro. From there, the container would be unloaded, boxes would be stacked on shelves, and whenever I got an order on my Shopify store the facility would ship out a table.
Once the ship was on the water it was supposed to take around 21 days until it arrived at the port. So I decided to run through all my contacts at each company one more time to make sure my plan was going to work just fine. The communication with my EasyPost rep had been spotty for the past couple months and they were going to be a key part of my operation so I began reaching back out to them.
Not long after I was informed they had sold their San Leandro facility to another 3PL operator whom I’ve never heard of before.
My packages were supposedly going to be shipped to another warehouse they owned in the midwest. As this was my first shipment there was no way I was going to send them across the country where I couldn’t get to them if something went wrong.
While the tables were on the water I called an audible and began looking for another 3PL company close by. The best option would have been to send them to another company in LA. Again, too far, not going to happen. Unfortunately I lived in a small studio apartment in San Francisco that had no chance of storing the tables that filled up a 20’ shipping container. So I eventually found a self-storage facility close by the port and my apartment that I could travel to whenever an order came in. This plan would involve quite a bit more work on my part but was the best option I had.
With the new storage facility locked in and some movers hired for a day, I was ready to lay hands on my tables.
Having never unloaded a shipping container before I had no idea if this was going to work. There was no loading dock, no pallets or pallet jacks, just me, 2 movers, and a truck driver. Initially I thought I may be able to unload the container myself. Thankfully I was smart enough to not do this which would have been a big mistake (the tables weigh 35lbs and 75lbs each). With my storage unit loaded up, I took a couple tables home to inspect.
The tables looked and functioned great! The legs seemed to work fine and nothing was damaged. I was off to the races. At the end of April I drafted up an email to send to my email list and got my Instagram post and ad ready to go. On April 26th, 2020, after 3 years in the making we launched to the world. That first week I got 8 orders, half from family and friends and half from strangers. I had officially made money online.
Most things I had read online always said you should launch with 1 product but I disregarded this advice for a few reason.
The typical beer die player is used to playing on a 4’ wide table so to be more widely accepted I decided to get some of these made since the design was similar.
The 2 different price points would allow for more types of people to buy them.
I liked the 2’ wide more so I wasn’t going to launch without this option.
Luckily both the 2’ wide Backpacker Beer Die Table and the 4’ wide Tournament Beer Die Table were selling. Unfortunately though, the 4’ wide was getting damaged in shipment since it was twice as heavy and the thin layer of packaging from the manufacturer wasn’t durable enough to protect the table when going through the mail.
With this bad news I needed a solution fast. I paused all Instagram advertisements and focused all my energy on finding a solution. Eventually I found a packaging company in San Jose to developed new packaging to go around the existing box.
2” of foam around the entire perimeter plus a double-walled corrugated box was the solution. For each 4’ wide table I would need to package it in its new armor before shipping it out. At this point I was thankful the EasyPost 3PL didn’t work out because it would have been a mess trying to get the 4’ wide tables back to repackage.
After a month of packaging R&D I’m now back up and running. While the new packaging is not ideal it’s a solution that works and is required if I want to sell the 4’ wide tables.
All my energy is now focused on marketing and selling the tables. I’m beginning to experiment with channels outside of Instagram and in the coming weeks I’ll be setting up an Ambassador program targeted at college students. The goal will be to introduce them to Diewood so when they graduate and move to a big city apartment without a yard, they’ll be able to keep the beer die dream alive as well. Time to sell.