Not Quite the American Dream: Why We Closed Flat Out USA
Posted by Merry Cadalso on
We closed Flat Out USA in April. I have not talked about it until now, so here is the whole of it. The video is above, and if you would rather read than watch, it is all written out below.
Why I am telling you at all
I believe in keeping it real, and that means sharing the bad with the good.
Every business has ups and downs. If we only ever show you the ups, you end up with a false impression of who we are and what we do. You are part of this. We love supporting you, and we love being part of your trips away, so it is only fair that you get to be part of ours, including the hard bits.
There is a second reason. I am pretty good at turning a bad situation into a good one. Not in the "well, at least we learned something" way people say when they are being polite about a disaster. I mean we genuinely came out of this with things we did not have before. If writing it down helps one person see the good in their own bad patch, it is worth putting on the internet.
Why we went to America in the first place
We did not go chasing a hunch. The customers came to us first.
Back when we only had an Australian website, people in the United States were finding us, filling a cart and paying well over $100 in freight to get our gear shipped across the Pacific. Mostly Multi-Reels, sometimes a hose. It was happening multiple times a month.
Our reaction was the obvious one. If Americans are willing to pay that much just in freight, there must be a real market sitting there. So we did more research, it looked good, and we started the long, tedious process of setting up a company in another country.
Setting up a business overseas is harder than anyone tells you
I cannot stress this enough. It is so hard.
Nothing you would assume carries across actually carries across. Accounting is different. Customer mentality is different. Shipping is different. Warehousing is different. Even the way a pallet gets loaded is different.
The only thing that was exactly the same was how to log into Facebook.
What actually went right
Plenty, as it turns out.
We made some brilliant ads. We made real connections with good people. My ad agent over there has become one of my closest friends, which on its own is a win I would not trade back. We got to travel, film content overseas and sit down with potential suppliers we would never have met otherwise.
None of that shows up in a profit and loss statement, and all of it came home with us.
What went wrong
Timing, mostly, and a fair bit of it was out of our hands.
By the time we were properly ready to go, the ground had shifted. Governments had changed. Rules had changed. Tariffs, wars, general uncertainty. When people are worried about their grocery bill, they are not buying themselves a premium organiser for the garage, and they are especially not buying one from a company they have never heard of, made by people they do not know.
Product did move. It just never moved enough to cover itself. Not the warehousing fees, not the advertising it took to shift the few that went.
Then the rest of it stacked up. My business partner pulled out last year. Not long after, our biggest customer here in Australia went under, which anyone who has followed our story will already know about. Cash flow at home was tight, and we were still funding an investment in a new industry on the other side of the world.
I gave it one more push. Around April this year I finally said enough.
Why we chose to stop rather than push on
Here is the part people find strange. I think we could have made it work.
If I had been willing to invest for another four years, I reckon we would have come out the other side as a profitable American company, and that could have been something. But it would have cost four more years of my attention, and attention is the one thing I cannot order more of.
So I wrote the investment off and bought myself bandwidth instead. We brought the stock home and closed the door.
The bad version is simple. We spent a lot of money and got nothing back. It hurt more than the customer collapse did last year.
What it taught me
I do not resent a cent of what that lesson cost.
I love doing business in Australia. I love the vibe here. You get my jokes. I can be as dirty with my puns as I like and you laugh instead of complaining. I was advised, repeatedly, that I could not do that in the States. I had to be straight. I could not stand up and say I am the hose lady and I pimp hose for a living. I had to be so careful, and I love that I do not have to be careful here. The more stupidity we put on our Facebook page, the more of it you want.
I can say "one day" and mean nothing by it. Next time someone asks if I have thought about branching into Germany, I can say "yeah, one day" and leave it there, instead of getting stars in my eyes and losing six months to it.
I know exactly what we are now. Caravan connections, the full suite. That clarity came directly out of this. A Multi-Reel on its own is a great product, but it is not where we shine. Where we shine is the full set: your drink water hose, your sullage hose, your extension leads, the bag, the accessories, all of it together. It is easy to look at the numbers and go "people love Multi-Reels, let's sell more Multi-Reels", and that approach does not actually work very well.
One thing beats two things. I stopped splitting my attention between two companies, and I stopped asking my team to split theirs. Everyone is pointed at the same thing now, and the business has grown more this year than in any year before it.
Do not chase someone else's dream. I wanted to go international partly because my business partner wanted it. I wanted it for him. If my heart is not in something, it is not going to work, and I think if mine had truly been in it, the US would have taken off faster. The truth is I was already too invested in what we do here.
The blue Multi-Reels
When we shipped the stock home, a pile of large Multi-Reels came back in the container. Blue ones, with USA stickering on them. We do not do blue on anything else and we are not making more, so what came back is all there will ever be.
They are going out discounted while they last.
There is a red Multi-Reel sitting in my office. A customer bought it in 2003 and gave it back to me years later, still working. We never made red again, and that is exactly what makes it worth keeping. These blue ones will be the same story. Someone will still have theirs in twenty years and be able to say they remember the time Flat Out had a crack at America and came home.
If you want a piece of that, grab one. You will be giving us our warehouse space back at the same time.
SHOP 30% OFF BLUE MULTI-REELS ➜
Questions people have asked
Is Flat Out closing down? No. Flat Out International is trading in Australia as normal and this has been our strongest year to date. The only thing that closed was the separate American arm of the business.
Can I still order from Flat Out if I am overseas? Yes. We ship internationally from Australia the same way we always did before we opened the US company.
Are the blue Multi-Reels different to the normal ones? Only the colour and the USA stickering. They are the same product, built the same way, with the same warranty.
Thanks for reading the long version, and thanks for sticking with us through a year that had a bit of everything in it.
