Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Okay, New shipping plan in the works!

Here is what we have decided to do and how we think we will have a business edge, and a better result.

We have the trophies from 35-50 hunters a year to ship. This can be several hundred either mounted or just dip and pack.

The Shipping and the Dip Pack is out of control as we know. Taxidermists want to do the taxidermy in RSA, not send the work overseas. So they crank up the cost of the dip pack to challenge the hunters to see that taxidermy is not that much more expensive and there is no dip fee when taxidermy is completed.

So we are going to buy, and establish our own dip pack operation. The investment will be fairly significant, but we may also be able to contract out the services done in our facility to a dip pack company. That's still a looming discussion/ decision.

It will drop the cost of the dip pack by 50% and decrease time to complete by 50% or more. We will also have the operation under our thumbs so to speak overseeing all that is involved. I may have to move back temporarily to organize all this.

Now the next piece of the puzzle is shipping. My Partner's exact words were F the shippers, I'm going to have a container dropped here and once it's full I will ship a whole container over by sea. No way we are playing this game with the air shipping companies any more.

Positive side here is cost reduction in a big way. In our preliminary research on the price we used an exact example from a recent air shipment and had the sea train quote it as part of a hypothetical container shipment. The cost for that single trophy shipment went from 1550 bucks to 280 bucks.

Negative side, the container must go to one port to be cleared. This means shipping across country in the USA however that should be easily absorbed in the far lower shipping charges over seas.

Possible delay in shipping trophies because we need a full container before we ship to save the money.

On the other hand, with the much faster dip pack time line there might be a break even time line.

We are also thinking this could grow for us with other outfitters using our facilities and shipping using our containers. Then the frequency of shipping would be much faster. The charges for us will be to pay our employees a great salary benefit package to hire professionals, but not to have a markup on our own customers. Just the cost to ship. Where it's a reasonable profit making operation comes from the other outfitters using available space in our containers. Not to mention having this as part of our business going forward will certainly increase the interest in the folks hunting with us.

If we do this it will be by container ship which is about 10days travel by sea. In the grand scheme of the time line 2 days flying or 10 days by sea is not much difference when the whole process is 6 months or so.

In anycase we are on this for solutions. I'm not throwing in the towel. We are a hunting operation, not a trophy prep and shipping business. However, I have the hunting part down pretty good. This might be the time to expand into a bigger operation which aids in the hunting business.