We are currently standing at a crossroads, and want to give an update to our beloved customers.
Road #1 is to liquidate as much as we can over the next year and then close shop for good. Absorb as much costs as we can, cut our losses, and move on.
Road #2 is to continue selling, but things will be radically different. If we take road #2, we will shrink AVSC down to an atom. Beyond small artisan, beyond micro artisan - hobby artisan. What this looks like is stark.
- The site would be reduced to a landing page for information. No orders, no reviews, no reward program. This would be an immediately effective tourniquet. All products would be moved to Etsy. The site storefront is one of our biggest sources of financial bleeding.
- Product range would be reduced to shave soap pucks, tallow soap packs, aftershave, and deodorant (maybe). The kicker: one scent (but keep unscented). Not only would we condense down to one scent, it would be a duality blend of two of our year 1 fragrance based scents (Payday & Lieutenant). Scenting with essential oils is no longer remotely feasible. Using fragrance oil would be the only way Road #2 would even be possible to take due to its cost reductions. The essential oil era ends, ironically returning to the fragrance era, which we only started out with because of the start up budget. We have come full circle.
- Likely an increased in commitment costs to a degree. This aspect still requires a lot of math and with a zoomed out view, which we don't have enough data or capital to even look at yet. This is more of a hunch currently, but we wanted to at least seed an expectation just in case.
At the time of writing this, Road #1 is currently the most likely path, unfortunately. We gave it everything we had and then some, but the AVSC experiment is effectively over. Born in the most hostile small business economy since the great depression, our odds of surviving were never great. Road #1 is admitting defeat, Road #2 is essentially just refusing to die out of spite.
We will make more update posts to TSB as we get closer to the path we take. For now, the liquidation will continue. Consider every single product you see (both the site and the etsy store) a last chance product. Nothing currently offered will have reliable inventory again, some will never return once the current stock depletes. We are in complete cost-cutting & assess mode.
The AVSC Team