Label Update
Yes, we have made some big changes to our labels. First and most importantly, these changes are isolated to our labels - no changes have been made to our team, company, values or ingredients.
There are a few core reasons for this change:
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The supply of the wood veneer is very precarious. There is only one manufacturer in the US that makes the material and we have experienced numerous outages where they could not deliver the needed labels for our lip balms. This has been very anxiety-producing for us and our company with us being unable to make our products on time. It is not a popular material due to its cost and difficulty to apply so it is never kept in stock by label printers.
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Our small production team of just seven people has spent a disproportionate amount of their time trouble shooting issues with the wooden labels. Each batch of wood labels has a lot of variability in its thickness and pliability, resulting in the team needing to recalibrate our labeler constantly. This produced a tremendous amount of wasted labels that were misapplied and consumed much of our team’s valuable time reworking mislabeled tubes. We take issues seriously that impact our team's enjoyment of their work and sense of accomplishment. It was dispiriting to see so much wasted material and effort.
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Costs have been rising consistently for small US manufacturers like Portland Bee Balm. It is important to us that we make a high quality product that is also available at an accessible price point. The savings we make by reducing waste in our labeling process and the lower price of the paper labels will allow us to absorb these price increases without raising prices for customers.
We appreciate your support during this transition and hope to continue providing you with simple, honest, natural products for years to come.
The PBB Team