Vulpine Creations was founded during the pandemic — “definitely not fortunate timing” as I’ve said before. The supply chain challenges hit us from day one.
By the time we were trying to get our production pipeline running, supply chains were frozen. Our manufacturing partners had reduced capacity significantly. International shipping routes were disrupted — shipping container costs went from EUR 750 to EUR 16,000. Raw material prices surged. Products sat in harbors for months.
The business model we were trying to build had every link in the chain broken simultaneously. Not partially. Entirely. Every link in the chain was broken simultaneously.
This is the story of what we built from the rubble. Not because adversity is romantic — it isn’t. But because the constraints of the pandemic forced decisions that made the business stronger than the original model ever could have been.
The First Week
The first week of lockdown was pure triage.
We had approximately three months of existing inventory at Amazon’s warehouses — units that had been shipped before the disruption. Revenue from those units would continue as long as Amazon continued fulfilling orders (they did, with delays). Beyond that three-month buffer, we had nothing coming in.
Adam and I sat in our respective apartments — physical meetings were impossible — and made three decisions:
Decision one: Stop all ad spend immediately. Our advertising budget was EUR 3,000 per month. With uncertain revenue ahead, that cash needed to be preserved. We paused every campaign. Revenue would come from organic ranking and existing customer base only.
Decision two: Cut every non-essential expense. The profit first system saved us here. Because our expenses were already lean and our accounts were separated, we knew exactly which costs were essential (hosting, minimal software, communication tools) and which could be paused (new product development, packaging upgrades, marketing subscriptions).
Decision three: Talk to our manufacturer. Not by email — by phone. The factory owner was dealing with his own crisis: reduced workforce, uncertain demand, supply chain interruptions for raw materials. We needed to understand his reality before we could plan ours. The relationship we’d built over dinners and visits paid off: he was honest about his constraints and committed to prioritizing our orders when production resumed.
What We Built Instead
With the physical supply chain frozen, we had a choice: wait for it to thaw, or build something that didn’t depend on it.
We chose to build.
In April 2020, we launched a digital product — a guide related to our physical product category, sold as a downloadable PDF through our own website. The product cost nothing to manufacture, nothing to ship, and nothing to store. The margin was nearly 100%.
It wasn’t our core business. It wasn’t our strength. But it was revenue that the pandemic couldn’t disrupt.
The guide sold. Not spectacularly — a few hundred copies in the first month. But the revenue covered our essential expenses while we waited for the supply chain to recover. More importantly, the digital product forced us to build a direct-to-consumer channel that we’d never prioritized. An email list. A payment system on our own domain. A relationship with customers that didn’t depend on Amazon as an intermediary.
That direct channel became one of Vulpine’s most valuable assets. By the time we exited Vulpine — selling the product rights and inventory to respected magic companies — the email list and direct-sales infrastructure were specifically valued by the buyers.
The Velocity Lesson
The pandemic constraints accelerated our velocity because they eliminated the option of doing things slowly.
Before the pandemic, a new product took four to seven months from concept to launch. During the pandemic, the digital guide went from idea to live in eleven days. Not because we cut corners — because the constraint eliminated all the time-consuming steps that a physical product requires: manufacturing, shipping, customs, warehouse intake, listing optimization.
This experience fundamentally changed our approach to speed. When physical production resumed, we maintained the velocity mindset: what is the fastest path from idea to customer? What steps can be eliminated, compressed, or parallelized?
The Ship It Ugly principle, which we’d already been practicing, became more urgent and more natural. The pandemic proved that speed wasn’t just a competitive advantage — it was a survival mechanism.
What the Rubble Revealed
When the existing structure collapses, you see what was load-bearing and what was decorative.
Load-bearing: Customer relationships. Product quality. Financial reserves. The manufacturer partnership. The systems for inventory management and quality control.
Decorative: The elaborate advertising strategy. The ambitious product launch timeline. The social media content calendar. The conference appearances.
The load-bearing elements survived the collapse and supported the rebuild. The decorative elements were the first casualties and, honestly, weren’t missed. The business that emerged from the pandemic was leaner, more focused, and more resilient than the one that entered it.
The subtraction audit became visceral rather than theoretical. We didn’t need to audit what to remove — the pandemic removed it for us. What remained was the essential. And the essential, properly maintained, was enough.
The Recovery
By September 2020, the supply chain was functional again — not fully recovered, but functional. Our manufacturer was producing at 80% capacity. Amazon was accepting inventory. Shipping routes were operating with delays but operating.
We re-launched with three improvements that the pandemic had forced:
Improvement one: Diversified sales channels. No longer 100% dependent on Amazon. Direct sales through our website now represented 15% of revenue and growing. The email list continued to grow and convert.
Improvement two: Reduced inventory risk. Smaller, more frequent production runs instead of large quarterly batches. This reduced the cash tied up in inventory and made us more responsive to demand fluctuations.
Improvement three: Faster iteration cycle. The velocity we’d developed during the pandemic became permanent. New products launched in three to four months instead of seven. Digital products supplemented physical ones during production gaps.
By December 2020, revenue had recovered to pre-pandemic levels. By March 2021, it exceeded them. The year that everything fell apart produced the business practices that carried Vulpine through its strongest growth period and eventually to a successful exit.
The rubble wasn’t just rubble. It was raw material. And what we built from it was better than what stood before.
