I should start by cutting to the chase and saying we have had to take the decision that as of the 6th August we will be discontinuing our Repeat Customer Discount, but I do feel it is important I explain that their is a very good reason for us to take this decision.
When we started our Repeat Customer Discount, it was started as a way of saying thanks for your custom and we never planned to remove it, but sadly a lot has changed.
When we brought this in , our profit margins were at 70% and we felt that what we did was special enough that we didn't need to compete on price, but then came Covid, the Plastic Tax, the Plastic Ban and the New EPR regulations and all of these events have changed things considerably.
We know it's hard for food businesses to run a sustainable business these days, we know our customers (and our former customers) want to do the right thing but all these increases have meant that a lot of our most loyal customers have had to go back to plastics , and we understand it , when it comes to survival , plant based packaging is a luxury.
So this has meant we had to make some big choices to survive, I have listed them below, just to give you an idea of what we have had to do to survive.
- Reduce our Profit Margin from 70% to 15 to 25% , this obviously was quite a brave thing to do, as we weren't a profitable business, so to reduce our profit margin seemed like financial suicide.
- Absorbed the extra costs, the materials our products are made of has gone up by about 22% on average but then we add the Plastic Tax ( in case you don't know we have to pay the tax for not putting plastics in our products) and now we have the new EPR tax ( average of 8%) which we are also absorbing.
- We have cut all non essential expenditure , our marketing has gone down from £2000 per month to zero.
- We reuse all of our waste to save on shipping packaging. (this has big environmental benefits as well as financial).
- We eliminated free delivery on orders over £75.00 (it's now £125.00) and we now charge what it costs (unless your shipping costs more than £15 and we absorb the extra costs).
- We have lost 75% of our team and they haven't been replaced, don't worry this hasn't increased our teams work, only mine as I now hold the role of Operations Director, Media Manager, Technical Manager and Finance Director.
- Reduced the discounts for bulk orders.
So all of these changes have meant we have had the choice of adding them to our prices or absorbing them ( this is what we decided to do), and in most cases we have lowered our prices to bring them inline with plastic packaging prices, to encourage people to come back onto the sustainable path.
So these lower prices have to be paid for , so sadly this is why we are ending our repeat customer discount because there is examples of some products that after discount we end up making 5%, which I'm sure we don't need to tell you is not sustainable in the long term.
So why I am telling you this , it's because we believe in being transparent and you deserve to know that it isn't we don't appreciate your custom or rampant profiteering, but if we want to keep our prices to as low as possible and be around in 2026 onwards, we had to make changes and this is the one we can make while being transparent, we did consider adding 10% to all of our prices, but this didn't feel very ethical, just so we could avoid removing a discount that made sense in 2020 and sadly is no longer sustainable.
As always myself and my team are here to answer any questions and I do apologise if this comes as a disappointment, but I do hope you have noticed how many of our prices have gone down.
