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Most successful product in all of Shark tanks. If you see my underachiever fellow sharks, just remind them as bomba sucks my investment.
It sucks.
You don't know, it's usually it always is, very honestly the entrepreneur. And then you back into how they're making good, manufacturing it, delivering it, and then you go into the numbers.
Of course, one of the biggest challenges with these consumer types of products is obviously sourcing the materials and the other supplies that you need to make, package and ship those things out. And I guess that's where Kareem comes
in with a lifetime of experience in that area. And I am curious not so much as to what kind of advice you give Damen and other entrepreneurs, but how much you've had to change that advice over the years as things like tariffs and geopolitical issues have kind of shifted.
What the supply chain.
Is sure, I mean, the supply chain is the most consistent, inconsistent market you could ever think of. The only consistency is inconsistency. And the problem is is that you have this mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors, And the only way to really be disruption proof is to be nimble and adept and agile and have plan BCD and E, because in the end, if the supply chain can't deliver, who is the ultimate consumer customer?
It breaks down all the way back.
So whether we're talking about a pandemic, or we're talking about tariffs or a strike at the ports or whatever it may be, the ultimate fulfillment is to the customer at the end. So the strategies that we always have to look at are really industry by industry, product by product to determine how to manage these things.
Well, you mentioned the pandemic, and this is something I always wonder about when it comes to conversations about supply chains. Whether or not the experience with the pandemic made supply chains may be more resilient, maybe a little bit more flexible than they would have been otherwise heading into this tarf shock or whether we're talking about too hirely different set of circumstances.
Ultimately we should have learned a lot more, I think
as it comes to the global supply chain. But you know, hindsight's always twenty twenty and you know, as soon as things calm down, everybody just kind of turn their attention to what was most in front of them, and in doing so, you lose some of those fundamentals and those ideas, which is how to be robust, how to be resilient, how to have your alternatives in place, And that ends up being the biggest level of disruption because you have all your eggs in one basket and things change, and
then how do you basically accommodate those changes? So I would suggest, and we always are talking to our companies and brands that we speak to about what are you going to do if there's no product available?
What are you going to do if your costs.
Increase significantly or if your supplier just can't deliver anymore?
Do you have those plans in place?
And anybody who has a strong supply chain has a diverse supply chain. Regardless of what we're talking about, whether it's a pandemic, or it's tariffs or whatever it may be, the diversity of the supply chain is going to be the key to success.
Well, David, bring us into the lived experiences of some of these companies, some of these brands, you know, when you're talking to founders, what industries tend to be disproportionately impacted by what we're talking about.
Well, anything that you need several different aspects and several different components. You know, Listen, when I first started, I was making Guatemala, and then I was making a Korea that shifted over to China. But then China, these factories are opening and closing just as fast. They're owned by the government. Right then I moved over to Turkey and India. So if you're having different components, right, and so that's why you know, I had reached out to find somebody
like a Kareem. I actually found Koreem because I don't have time to deal with all that, right, And that's the problem when you are somebody who's building a brand. You start a brand and you want to solve a problem or bring somebody joy, But all of a sudden, now you have to learn manufacturing, shipping, finance, social media and all this other stuff. So again, somebody that like like Kareem, who has two thousand factories at their fingertips, are the ones that you want to go to because
there is no one answer. Tariffs, quota, it's illegal to make a product over here, government, change war, it's all over the place.
I mean. One interesting thing that's come out of this though, Korea. Man. We talked a lot about this on this show back during the pandemic when all the supply chains basically got disrupted.
With this idea that companies now and executives had to really start to think a lot harder about the supply chain, and to a certain extent, it almost ended up being a silver lining as companies that never really thought about it, all of a sudden, we're finding ways to innovate, finding ways to be more creative.
Has that stuck?
Yes, I do believe it's stuck, and I believe that we're creating more and more best practices. And how we see that isn't just with businesses, but even at the level of education. Look at how many universities now we're offering supply chain management degrees and master's program so on. We have generations of supply chain professionals that are learning from the issues of the past.
Damn, I'm really curious why you're seeing On the consumer level, we keep talking about how prices, maybe the rate of change is slowing down, but absolute price is very sticky. What are you seeing when it comes to consumer health, especially as we head into the holidays.
Well, you know, we saw it to shift where you can buy things directly from the.
Consumer from the maker.
At the end of the day, Now, when you're buying an overseas, you're getting you know, twenty thirty fifty percent increase. But if you're dealing with big box stores, embarrasses they say, I am not making I'm not selling this to my consumer more than nine dollars and nine nine. That's that's
your problem. And if you don't want to do it, I'm going to find somebody else is going to do it cheaper with a bigger smile, so they don't want to pass that on to the consumer at the end of the day, when you're dealing directly with big box retailers or retailers in general,