Notes From the Hardest Year.

Year eight is the year nobody warns you about.

Year one has fire. Year three has rhythm. Year five has a system that mostly works. Year eight has receipts.

Not the kind you file. The kind you carry.

Year eight is the year you stop counting wins and start counting what they cost. The customer who became a friend. The friend who became a stranger. The vendor who took your money and changed his phone number. The buyer who said yes on a Tuesday and ghosted you by Friday. Year eight is the year the math of all of it finally catches up to the same table.

People see the brand. They see the labels, the bottles, the booth at the show, the followers on a feed. They do not see the bad mornings. They do not see the comments you read and could not unread. They do not see the warehouse at six in the evening, lights still on, you sitting on a bucket trying to figure out if any of it was the right call.

Year eight is the year that question stops scaring you. The answer is yes. The question itself was the problem.

I learned how to read people in year one. The established brands made it easy. They did not like me from day one and they did not pretend to. The co-pack partner made it easier. He took eight grand and disappeared. That should have ended the business. Instead it sent me into a room with a problem and a deadline. I figured out stick pack production myself. Under a month. More on that another time.

The short version is this. The worst thing that happened that year is the reason this company still exists. Every founder I respect has a story like that one. Most of them will not tell you about it.

Most days I feel like I could take on the world. Most of those same days I feel like I am nowhere near where I should be.

Both are true.

Year eight is when you stop pretending one of them is the lie.

For a long time I thought I was supposed to compete with all of that.

I thought scale was the goal. I thought every shelf I was not on was a personal failure. I would walk into a grocery store, find the Bloody Mary section, find the spice aisle, and stand there staring at them like I was watching my ex on a date with another guy. Disappointed. 

Most of those bottles belonged to companies I will never be the size of. Most of them paid to be exactly where they were standing.

That is not paranoia. That is not self-doubt.

That is The Shelf.

The Shelf is the thing nobody tells you about when you start a food company. The Shelf is the rule the whole industry runs on, and the rule is older than any of us in this fight.

The shelf decides which owner takes the family to Maui. The shelf decides which owner spends Saturday at the laundromat, watching jeans tumble just to get some time to think.

The shelf is not a fair fight.

The shelf is a price list. Slotting fees. Category buyers. Promotional dollars parked in the aisle and wrapped up in a bow before the customer ever walks in. Big brands pay big money so the small ones stay small. They are very, very good at it.

None of this is the customer's fault. None of it. The customer walks down the aisle, sees the bottle at eye level, and assumes the bottle earned that spot. Like its the best tasting mix available to them. Most days the bottle did not earn anything. The bottle paid to be in 1 of the 4 lame choices available. Bloody Mary mix is not grocery, its a NA mixer category distributed by liquor companies. You want your pickles in the grocery store, not a problem. You want your spice mixes there, sure we support local all day! But, mixers, ya not so much. 

Then there is Amazon, which used to feel like the great equalizer.

I listed Devil Daves on Amazon in 2017. The platform took roughly thirty percent of the sale. That was easy to understand. I sent product. They took a fair share. I paid my bills.

They handled the visibility. I handled the product. The math worked. It was enjoyable too.

It was a different time, before Covid, before what some of us now call The Great Reset. Telling your friends you had your stuff on Amazon was a real moment. It was the 2005 version of having your own website. People leaned in. They asked questions. They wanted to see the listing. They were excited for you.

I remember the first big pallet going out to Amazon's warehouse. Cases stacked, shrink-wrapped, labeled, the inventory IDs printed and matched, the bill of lading on the clipboard. I watched the truck pull out of the lot. That truck was carrying months of work. My baby.

I went back inside and stood in the warehouse for a minute. Hands still moving on instinct. Head finally quiet. Somebody my size had just gotten his product into the biggest store in the world.

I finally had my shelf.

Today the door is still there. The price of walking through it is not.

Today Amazon takes close to seventy percent of every sale.

Fees. Fulfillment. Storage. Returns.

Ads, because without ads you do not exist. Without ads you are page two. Page two is a graveyard.

Every quarter, every year, another line item on the statement creeps up. Seventy percent. To a company whose owners have five yachts and ten homes.

All of it built on the backs of guys like me.

You do not run a small batch business on what is left after seventy percent.

So you raise prices. Then you watch the bad reviews come in, reading like we just kicked their dog.

"Overpriced." "Not worth the money." "We used to love this brand."

Here is what I want every customer reading this to understand, because all of you are good people and most of you are getting squeezed too. The price on the shelf is not the price the maker chose. The price on the shelf is the price the maker has left after every corporate monster took their cut. The producer is the last one paid. Always.

And tariffs. I paid those but my books cannot consume them, so you know where they end up. That's the truth for all PCG products. 

Every founder my size eventually makes the same decision. Especially in food and consumer goods, where prices have a ceiling the customer enforces with one click. You build a strategy to get a loyal customer to spend a little more. Not because you want to charge more. Because that is the only honest way to keep the doors open.

The costs that used to be manageable are not manageable anymore. The tariffs that should not exist exist. The shipping increases that should be temporary are permanent. The packaging that cost thirty-five cents three years ago and costs a dollar today. None of that shows up on the shelf. All of that shows up on my desk every single day.

The gloves are coming off as I write this first volume. I think they have to. Eight years is a long time to keep some of this wrapped up.

Maybe that is what year eight is really for. Some would call it "venting."

What I have come to understand is that I am not in the same race they are running. I am not trying to fill every shelf in the country. I am trying to make something I am proud to put my name on. We put our own spin on every bottle, every batch, every label, and I think that is what our fans respect. It is what makes us a little different than them.

Small batch is not a marketing line for my brand. It is the actual size of the room we work in. It is the reason a bottle of Pickle Crack tastes like it does, and the reason a Bloody Mary stick pack feels like something a person made instead of something a machine spit out. When somebody opens a order shipment from us, the tape is on there because I or somebody standing next to me ran it across the seam. We signed the packing slip and added the goodies. We notice every single name that we have seen before!  That is not a story we tell. That is a logistical fact.

The hard part of year eight is not the work. The work I love. The hard part is sitting with the truth that the system is not built for businesses like mine, and choosing to keep building anyway.

Labor is the piece that wears on me most days. Finding people who want to show up and care about a small operation, who do not see this as a placeholder until something bigger comes along, that is the real bottleneck. A big plant has the budget to absorb turnover. A room our size feels every empty chair. So we move slower than I would like, and we hold standards higher than is convenient, because the alternative is a product I would not want my name on.

Here is where I have landed.

I may never outspend the giants. I may never outscale them. I am not going to win whatever fee war Amazon decides to wage next quarter. What I can do is make a better product than they can, tastier than they can, with more care than they have any reason to give, and I can keep doing it for the people who already know the difference. That is a smaller fight. It is mine. It is honest.

Year nine, the plan is simple. Protect the product. Protect the shelf. Stay close to the customers who keep showing up. Keep finding ways to ship a little smarter, source a little tighter, and lose a little less to the platforms that have decided seventy percent is a reasonable ask.

This is where I am. And honestly, thanks for being here with me!