engineeredAF

STOPPING CONSUMER SALES AFTER 13 YEARS. After thirteen years of building a respected brand from nothing—driven by a bootstrapped ethos and anchored in a sincere effort to reindustrialise while also showing a new generation the quiet dignity of making world-class products with their own hands— @67Designs now finds itself compelled to cease direct sales to consumers at the close of this month, January 2026. This decision to withdraw from the consumer market is the inevitable consequence of a market utterly inundated with counterfeit goods, brazen knock-offs, almost exact replicas, all pouring in from China. We are witnessing a deliberate race to the bottom driven by Amazon and Shopify store ecommerce bros, where honest American manufacturers are dragged under by forces they cannot hope to compete/scale when the competitors use the slogan "The same as 67 Designs, but cheaper" - all while draping their Chinese products in the American flag deliberately to defraud veterans, law enforcement and the public at large. While enterprises wisely shift towards genuine Made-in-USA sourcing – a path 67 Designs will now prioritize – the consumer realm tells a different, grim story. Chinese producers in 2025 are largely holding prices steady, barely budging even amid inflation and tariffs, while American firms grapple with material costs soaring over 25% in 2025 alone. The fraudsters, waving American flags on their shoddy imports, profit handsomely from this imbalance. A product that costs a minimum of $25 to produce in Texas lands in the counterfeiters warehouse for around $4 from China. They reverse-engineer new @67Designs products in well under 120 days and have appropriated over 90% of our original portfolio – all the research, development, and market-building done by @67Designs. It is simply impossible to absorb escalating costs – whether raw materials or an 18% rise in staff BCBS health insurance – when the market is flooded with fakes priced below US sourced raw inputs. Throw in the predictable supply-demand curve for skilled machinists in the US and the costs will soar upwards massively by 2027. The acceleration has started and with retirements and death a factor for our nation's best machinists the cost per part could triple inside 24 months - yes, even with automation. In time, the company's site will shift to an informational resource, laying bare the stark reality facing every American innovator: sophisticated networks of domestic counterfeiters operating like modern pirates, plundering intellectual property with impunity. These are not amateur operations; they are organized, legally armored groups, exploiting a broken legal system that enriches lawyers and delivers perverse rulings from the bench. They shill for China. Make no mistake about it. Patents, trademarks, trade dress – all issued by the USPTO – mean little when the apparatus meant to protect them fails so spectacularly. We can debate whether a nation content with manufacturing only defense-related or nuclear technologies is sustainable, but the larger question looms: for three or four decades, we have lacked any credible Industrial Strategy to counter China. We still have no credible Strategy/Policy that can deliver tax and other incentives into the market to prevent the greatest loss of industrial knowledge in human history because there is little to no capital for generalized manufacturing services companies. Policymakers have allowed generalized commercial manufacturing (especially of consumer goods) to wither, unprotected and undermined. This is not just the story of one company; it is a symptom of a deeper US civilizational supply-chain complacency that has made America a consumer nation vs a balanced producer-consumer nation. If we continue to avert our gaze and think the DoW can alone save US manufacturing, we should not be surprised when the lights of genuine American ingenuity and creativity with atoms dim further. @JohnGardnerVoH @scotttmaier @ratwave @cpa_tradereform @NAIA