We’re busy doing what we love here at Boca Terry, designing attractive, comfortable and durable robes, towels, spa accessories and bedding. We continue to maintain long-term relationships with our clients at hotels, resorts, spas, medical facilities and more. Our hearts are full.
Our anxiety? High. While quality products and strong customer bonds have kept Boca Terry resilient during these colorful past couple of years, we deal with a lot behind the scenes. Here are serious challenges:
Shipping chaos. It’s hard to get shipping containers to bring goods from over factories overseas to the United States and our other markets. It’s also difficult to find space on a shipping vessel, and to find truckers to make the last leg of the voyage. We described that in detail in “Hey World, Where’s My Stuff?”; the situation has not improved. Ed Rone, who manages the entire factory-to-warehouse process for us via Expeditors, shares more detail here.
Rising expenses. Yet there’s more to this: $$$$. We urge you to order way earlier than you used to, as we do ourselves with the materials used to make Boca Terry products. But let’s talk cost. Only 18 months ago, we paid $3,500 for a 40-foot container filled with our robes, towels and lounge chair covers. That price brought the goods from our Shanghai factory to our Miami warehouse. Today, in summer 2022, the exact same enterprise runs $23,000. To be clear: $3,500 > $23,000. Looking at the financial hit per unit, that’s a rise of 53 cents less than two years ago to $3.53 today.
Nexus taxes. In its 2022 tax compliance guide for businesses, Avalara noted similar price surges, along with worldwide labor shortages and other challenges. Among those, on the domestic front, let me point out the turmoil around keeping up with new Nexus tax requirements; those require us to figure out how much sales tax to charge and pay when we sell our products to clients in other U.S. stages. You can read more about that here.
We feel honored to keep serving you. We do all we can to keep prices down and inventory high. We ask that you understand when we need to charge more or delay a fulfillment obligation. We’re doing our best to keep operations smooth amid the backdrop of global shipping turmoil.
Let’s hope it all gets easier soon. Meanwhile, we are here to serve you.
Edward Cohen, co-owner, Boca Terry
