The week starting may 14th was a big week for us. After over a year of building in the shadows, we were finally ready to release our first product.
 
A limited edition prequel of the Gambler Pack called the ‘Launch edition’. We managed to sell out all 15 packs in less than 48 hours, you can read more about it here.
 
This was fantastic, the market wants what we have to offer. Even if it’s only a sticker pack, not the fully fledged clothing.

Everything was going too well…

I’m based in the UK and Michael is based in Germany. Because I got the early sticker sheets printed, I sent them out from the UK.

Used royal mail, weighed everything out, printed all the labels and posted it. Job’s a gooden, or so I thought.

3 days later, Michael messages me “we have a problem”.
 
He had been charged 9.60€ for duties and customs taxes. No one told us about this, I had asked at the post office, chat GPTed the shit out of it, nothing anywhere.

It seems obvious once you see it, but it is a real problem when your shipping low value items.

Almost a Worst case scenario

We jump into action and send an email out to our first customers, offering them a refund of the fees or some extra packs. A day later we got our first reply…

“…I will choose option 3 [extra packs] but without import costs.”

Thank fuck, this was a good sign. However, they still attached the receipt for their import costs.
26.14€

Thats 326% of the price of the product. For those of the slower variety, this is not a viable product for a business.

The solution

DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) shipping. When we send every pack out, there is a process in which us at Adaki, pay that customs fee before it gets to the customer.
 
We’ve got to be honest, there’s going to be some single pack sales we make a loss on.
But thats business right? We must create a solution and keep it pushing. We have to spread the message and it’s important we make our products accessible to everyone.

The solution is that we take advantage of Michaels location for European distribution. Inside the EU, no customs. Outside the EU, we find out the best trade agreement between the UK and EU and then distribute from there.