When the last year started, I certainly didn’t see it going the way that it did.
It would have been pretty easy to simply fold up and say it was fun while it lasted.
As 2025 is brand new I look back at the year that has just passed and reflect on the lessons learned, the mistakes made and look forward to the new year with hope. In the last six months of the old year, I have been asked several times if we were closing down, I hope to put that question to rest here.
When the last year started, I certainly didn’t see it going the way that it did. The business we have spent the last five years building saw some tough times this past year. The economy, or the economy locally, seemed to have very little excess funds to be putting into the type of business that we have here. While we did see sales regularly, we actually found that the number of sales were about one third of what they were in 2023. This can be blamed partially on some decisions that I made, and I take full responsibility of what those mistakes cost. I have no illusions about what the past year has cost us, but we have a plan to come out of it stronger.
Around the beginning of 2024 and maybe the end of 2023 it was clear to me that changes had to be made if were going to survive the economic slump. We made a large effort to increase our online presence and spread the brand to a larger audience to offset the impact of our lack of local sales. This seemed to be working to an extent, the only problem was that making sales online is more of a net zero when you factor in the costs of selling online coupled with the extremely low markup of online products to be competitive online. This was made painfully obvious around March of 2024 when we found ourselves in a no win situation with an online sale. Someone had used a stolen credit card to make a large online purchase through our e-commerce website. The original purchase was large enough that I was skeptical of in the beginning so I called the customer, the guy I talked to said it was all good so I sent it out once the payment cleared. I was still nervous about for a while but a month passed and I thought everything was good, then six weeks after the original order I found out about the stolen credit card. On a side note, customers are protected from credit card fraud, merchants are not. That is why our shelves have been bare for most of the year, and I’ve been working a full time job only opening the shop on Saturday’s. We aren’t completely recovered from this but we are getting there and we certainly do not have an e-commerce website anymore. I do apologize to those that used the platform but it was an revenue never once offset the expense of having it.
While it would have been pretty easy to simply fold up and say it was fun while it lasted, I love what I do, and I want to keep doing it. Certainly, this has been a challenge to keep the shop open, but the important lesson learned is that in the five years Labascus Armory has existed, we haven’t had a focus. We have tried to carry some of everything while focusing on nothing which meant that when someone came in they didn’t know what we would have and so many times even if the cases and racks were full, they were looking for something else. We look to the future and being the eternal optimist that I am, I look for brighter days, when the shop is open full time and the shelves are stocked full, only this time the shelves will be stocked full of one brand of firearm while other brands can be ordered on a special order basis, we are going to stock our shelves with Henry Repeating Arms.
We are not closing. I don’t know how long it will take to get where we want to be, but we are focused, we are committed, and we will make it.
We would like to Proudly announce that HenryUSA has been so kind as to make Labascus Armory a Henry Gold Dealer and we are grateful to them for that. This new designation only solidifies our commitment to becoming the premier Henry Dealer in central Kentucky.
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