Our company has been facing a lot of challenges - CEO's perspective

As a business, we should be as transparent as possible with our current and potential customers. Furthermore, communication is the best way to build a relationship between people. This is why it's time to be honest - it hasn't been easy for our company.

I am Ignas Plunksnis, the creator and CEO of the "Tucktec EU" project. First of all, let me preface this blog post by reassuring all of you - we are alive and we are producing kayaks. The purpose of this post is to have a clear explanation for existing customers in one place, and for future customers to recognize that we're working hard to provide the best product possible. We will tackle any and all problems that will come at us in the future with diligence and perseverance.

Let's start from the very beginning.

The idea of expanding Tucktec in to Europe started in 2022, when I contacted the US company with an idea to improve the landed cost of the kayaks. I loved the product and I wanted more people to get access to it - the joy of kayaking in the waters independently, easily and affordably is immense. Starting such a business is not easy - we needed to buy a minimum of 3 tonnes of plastic for every color that we wanted to sell. That is certainly not cheap, not to mention the other parts, labor costs and other expenses of the business.

Even though I had some money to start this venture, we still needed more, after all, one person cannot reasonably buy 12 tonnes of plastic. So, we applied for a loan from the Lithuanian national development bank, and in 2023, we got the necessary financing to start producing these kayaks en masse. That's when we signed the franchise agreement. Still, the road to our first sale wasn't without obstacles. After buying the necessary materials, we had to wait. We had to optimize the manufacturing processes. Every month we paid rent for a big space, which we weren't utilizing, because some of our suppliers were having delays. Nevertheless, in February 2024, we decided to launch pre-orders.

Well, on February 25th, the first order came, a person from the UK ordered two kayaks. After that, someone from Bulgaria ordered three kayaks. And it started snowballing. Unfortunately, even though we were reassured multiple times that the necessary parts would come on-time, they didn't. One supplier had their factory closed for a whole month, another supplier had problems with the Lithuanian Customs. So it was embarrassing to tell our first customers that they have to wait, and we had to keep moving the deadline. It was ridiculous, especially because these were things out of our control.

The scary incident.

In April, one of our first customers finally received their kayak. One day, I got a very angry call, saying that there was a tear in one of the fold lines and water started leaking inside the kayak. We were very worried, so we immediately halted production and marketing until we figured the issue out. The Americans reassured us that this happens one in a thousand times due to unwanted debris being on the CNC table, which means that the plastic is cut too deep and there's a risk of a tear. Nevertheless, we couldn't have risked selling more kayaks, and there were issues with our production line anyways, so we were working to resolve them.

Summer and the 2025 model

During the summer, my health problems started. It was very difficult to run the business, especially because we didn't have the resources to delegate my tasks. So, we were lackluster in the marketing department, we were especially timid to start any bigger campaigns because our production chain was fragile. But I'm happy to say that at least we fulfilled our orders at a good pace.

Then, in July of 2024, the US company released the 2025 model. On the surface, it is very funny that the Americans released the 2025 in the middle of the previous year. For us, it wasn't funny, because most of our plastic was already cut for the production of the 2024 models, and we just simply didn't have the resources to cut a lot of new plastic. But, the marketing from our franchiser worked great in their favor, because most new potential customers in Europe were always asking about the new model.

We couldn't sit with our hands in our pockets - we had to act fast. We found a potential compromise - implementing all of the new features of the 2025 model, except for the assembly mechanism. This way we avoid spending a lot of money on cutting new plastic and we satisfy the demands of our customers. Looking back, it wasn't as successful as we'd hoped, and we were again timid about launching a marketing campaign, because despite us having released the "compromise version", most of the inquiries were still about the new kayak which was proven to be successful in the US. Again, we had to do something, we had to push forward.

Logistical nightmares

So, we worked towards launching the 2025 model. Cooperating with the CNC company for a new batch of plastic was hard - they were on a tight schedule and barely had time to cut our plastic. This is the case to this day - that's why the price of the new model is significantly higher. We also had to buy new parts, make new assembly processes, all while having barely enough money to pay our employees. But we tried our best - after all, they have families to feed. We succeeded, but eventually we still needed to lay off our staff in the workshop, we couldn't sustain so many people without a solid cash flow, especially considering our country's tax rates. So, around the time of Black Friday, manufacturing delays started.

We did launch a pre-order opportunity for the 2025 kayaks and we eventually started delivering them. That's when a whole other type of logistical nightmare started. We decided that to save costs we would use a shipping aggregator. Unfortunately, they weren't so good with our packages, they were often losing them, not to mention the poor communication and ridiculous explanations. We had to switch service providers two times, eventually settling the issues by signing individual contracts with multiple logistics companies, which happened in March of 2025. Yes, there were still problems, for example - some packages were sent back to us for no good reason.

While we did think that things finally started getting back on track, something shocking happened recently. From the start of the year, we were already planning to move our facilities elsewhere, because the place we were renting was too big. One Friday afternoon, the building manager came to us and said that we had to leave until Monday. So, chaos erupted. Firstly, we had to move everything out of our old workshop, we had to organize a new place, we had to find a storage unit to store all of our stuff temporarily, some boxes had to be left in the rain, our chairs were stolen (we filed a police report), our partner's forklift operator was on a one month vacation, other forklift operators were busy, etc. The problems just never stopped coming. However, slowly but surely, we were getting back on track. I thank all of my friends for helping us in the process of moving and cleaning, and I thank the CNC company for providing us a place to continue assembling kayaks.

Sometimes, I'm at the workshop by myself, so I can't respond to emails. Sometimes, our customer relations manager is sick or dealing with life emergencies. But now we're getting back on track. We learned from our mistakes and we're trying to fix them as fast as we possibly can. All of these issues are very frustrating to us. We don't want to lose the trust of our customers, we don't want to disappoint anybody. So when shit like this happens, we are disappointed in ourselves. Whatever challenges we face, our customers come first and we will always try our hardest to remedy every situation as best as we can. Sometimes, it may not seem like enough. Sometimes we were even accused of lying. Well, even if it is not enough, it doesn't change the fact that we tried our best. Your trust is sacred and we will always treat it as such. Throughout the year that we've been active, exhaustion, illness and stress led to poor communication from us to our customers. This ends today.

Thank you.

To end this post in a more positive note, we want to thank everybody. Thank you for trusting us. Thank you for your patience and understanding. We will continue striving to provide the best experience to our customers.