Our final (I hope) inventory sell-off ends at midnight on Saturday. We have seven titles for sale, from 38 percent off to 54 percent off. My most recent book, “The Stick Chair Book,” is one of those books and is just $29 until Saturday.
The sale has cleared out the space we need to operate at our new warehouse building in downtown Covington. And it will give us the room to begin assembling our new Exeter-pattern hammers in-house. So thanks for all your help in storing our excess books at your house.
The bad news here is that we will raise prices on some books and tools effective July 15.
Like all households and small businesses, we have been squeezed by inflation during the last few years and have resisted raising prices in the hope that paper costs would decline. It hasn’t happened.
The price increase will affect 15 titles, including “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” “The Anarchist’s Workbench” and “Country Woodcraft.” I haven’t yet done the math for Crucible Tools, but I feel sure prices will go up on our Warrington Hammer and Lump Hammer.
Our original handle supplier in Arkansas decided to stop giving a crap about quality. So we left them and have been using two small companies that are doing a great job for us. But the handles cost five times as much.
Next week I’ll post a complete list of the upcoming price increases. I wish we didn’t have to do this, and we will be as transparent as possible during the process.
— Christopher Schwarz
Thanks very much for your transparency! It helps me prioritize and make better decisions.
I think your books are a steal, in part because of what’s inside, and in part because of how they’re made.
Odd that hammers are named after English towns. its probably a good thing they’re not named after Welsh towns or you’d find yourself having to say “pass me the Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch hammer”.
“Our original handle supplier in Arkansas decided to stop giving a crap about quality. So we left them and have been using two small companies that are doing a great job for us. But the handles cost five times as much.”
Curious that if you are paying so much more to new suppliers if your old supplier would have upped the quality for say 3x the old price? I guess I am trying to understand their underlying motivation for losing your business. Is it because:
a. Making handles was a “filler line” for them and they needed to free up time for their core business.
b. Decided it was not profitable enough so lowered the quality in which case renegotiated prices may have helped. In that case even a 3x increase would have been cheaper for LAP given the learning curve of the new suppliers and other cost associated with onboarding a new supplier.
Cheers
The handle company we worked with was huge. We are tiny. They kept giving us crap, and we kept asking for them to make it to spec.
In the end, they said, “You get what you get.” There was no option to pay more.
So we shopped around with small manufacturers. Their work is great, but it comes at a price because they don’t have the scale of the huge company.