Supply Chain & Production: Between a rock and a hard bar?

As you know, we are emphatic about American manufacturing and work with domestic companies whenever and wherever possible. At the same time, in order to keep costs at a reasonable level, we do use Chinese-made bottles, boxes, and bags (our bar soap and solid cologne boxes are made in the USA, but our shipping boxes are made overseas and bought from a US supplier).

We've always loved sharing our business journey with you, our customers and Outlaw gang, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about the local impact of a global epidemic like, hey, that virus we've been hearing so much about... ma ma ma myyyy Corona.

(sorry, I really tried not to type that, but I couldn't help it).

🐘 The elephant in the room

Chinese manufacturing dominates the global packaging supply chain. My favorite beauty packaging news source even wrote a whole article about the impact of Coronavirus on the supply chain. It's a big deal. This morning, when I was talking with our brand new lotion comanufacturer (in the USA), our rep was telling me that the factory closures in China might impact our ability to get bottles.

😳

Yeah. So, that's a thing.

However, this only impacts our bottled products (body wash, lotion, hand wash). And it might impact our solid cologne, but I think our solid cologne hook-up might have just ordered a metric ton of tins for the year, so 🤞.

We were planning on moving away from plastic bottles anyways (pending an investor to help us shoulder the huge upfront expense), so that's an interesting dynamic, right? Just at nearly exactly the time we had started conversations about changing to domestically created 100% post-consumer plastic, we see our supply chain of virgin plastic bottles dry up? I don't know... pretty convenient timing.

🧼 Raising the bar

Another thing we've been experimenting with is bar shampoo... negating the need for the plastic bottle at all.

In fact, right here on my desk, I have the first prototype of a Blazing Saddles Shampoo Bar, and I'm going to use it tomorrow morning.

(Side note: Some people have reported that they use our regular handmade bar soap in their hair, since it's made with super high quality ingredients and superfatted, which means there's a little extra oil in it for extra moisturizingness, but I haven't found that to be the superb experience that I demand from our products, so we do not officially recommend it)

We can also work on bar lotion eventually (though those are tricky and tend to be meltier than our solid colognes). I dunno... I have some issues with those.

What do you think of the packaging situation? How do you feel about post-consumer plastic? Bars? We'd love to know!