“Over the last six months we at Elemental Designs have been struggling due to a few key factors. You, our customers deserve the right to be aware of these issues.
Under my leadership for the past two years Elemental Designs has lost a large share of its customer base in both the home and car audio markets. This is due to inefficiencies in large scale business management on my behalf. The mismanagement of in house production caused an increase in customer lead times while our goal was to decrease them. Key raw materials which go into almost all home audio products reached critical inventory levels due to inadequate reordering management. Without these raw products we did not have the availability to ship orders in the quoted time.
This mismanagement of inventory meant that we had a surplus of products that would only sell when heavily discounted and not enough inventory on the items customers demanded. This was a large issue with home audio amplifiers and raw drivers, causing long delays between order placement and shipping times. To fulfill orders quickly it required us to use vendors based in the US. The largest issue here became shrinking margins and order quantity decreasing over the past six months. To complicate things even more, we ran into many out of stock parts on components we did require. This lead to item stocking issues and with warranty replacement issues. Without the proper inventory levels, we relied on repairing faulty amplifiers instead of shipping out a new unit.
All of this combined is what put us in the situation we are in today. We are putting the website in standby and are working on current individual open inquiries.
Thanks.
Alex Lindeman
CEO
Elemental Designs”
I agree with Jim. When I try and read between the lines here's my take, FWIW:
Alex ran the show and takes full responsibility of the demise. I've highlighted his ownership comments in Bold. However, the problem he eludes to is related to production, and production planning....typically not a primary focus of the CEO, but a core focus on the folks who ran operations and the floor. I've highlighted those comments in blue.
My guess is that Alex didn't have a grasp on his people to turn production around, and the production team weren't very good at their job. If I read into it more, it doesn't sound like Alex and the production people were in concert over the years, and Alex couldn't make the hard decisions to cut bait with the production management/team. As a result, the combination left them fishing with poisoned bait, and the fish left the pond or got really sick and died...
I'm sure its much more complicated than that, but I guess my point is that there were many points of failure and he eluded to it in his statement.
My .02
