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BRS acquired Marine Depot. (1 Viewer)

mrbill

mrbill

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GOLDEN VALLEY, MN., Aquatic Sales Solutions, LLC (dba Bulk Reef Supply) or “BRS”, the eCommerce leader in saltwater aquarium supplies has acquired California-based Marine Depot.

The Marine Depot website will continue to operate fully, including taking customer orders, until July 30, 2021. At which time, the site will be folded into BRS with all website traffic redirected to BRS (bulkreefsupply.com).

BRS is committed to ensuring Marine Depot customers are well supported during this transition. BRS will do so through the following initiatives:

  • Honoring all Marine Depot gift cards at Bulk Reef Supply
  • Transferring of loyalty reward points to a BRS account
  • Honoring the Marine Depot return policy for orders placed prior to June 23, 2021 (all sales on or after June 23, 2021, at Marinedepot.com are final)
  • Assisting with warranty support for qualifying orders.
  • Maintaining the Marine Depot long-standing blog & YouTube channel, popular among aquarists worldwide.
  • Keeping a strict focus on providing quality saltwater aquarium equipment.
  • Continuing to stock & support popular brands like AquaMaxx.
 
Wow is right. Now it makes sense why investors were brought in- buy out the biggest competitor.
 
There are still plenty of competitors in the industry with Premium Aquatics, Saltwater Aquarium, Petco, LiveAquaria, etc. I think this will be a long term benefit as it will likely give BRS a larger allocation of those hard to find products since Covid hit, and is an opportunity to onboard new brands.
 
I hope with this new combined company they drop the shipping minimums (free shipping) and possibly bring back food grade chemicals. Choices are nice given recent inflationary pricing pressures.

I still have a lifetime supply of kalkwasser in my basement.
 
I do hope they branch out a bit more on product brands. I have no idea how retail inventory works, but it sometimes feels like companies are committed to a particular brand and will not carry competitors. Only reason I ever order anything from anywhere not BRS, is because they do not carry it but one of the others do.
 
I gotta think warehouse capacity really plays a part in brands carried. When you have the potential volume capability of a BRS I'm assuming it takes considerable shelf space to keep an appropriate amount in stock.

Since the write up said the will continue to carry brands like aqua max I wonder if they will do split shipping like Amazon so they don't store everything in both locations.
 
There will be some new brands under the BRS umbrella but which will be hasn’t been determined outside of Aquamaxx. They are currently determining viability on a variety of factors like sales quantity and dollar value, brand quality (Ryan is big on if he won’t use it or thinks it’s lacking, he won’t sell it), and more factors. Essentially retail space is that there is a cost to have the product on your shelf versus something else.

For the time being the Marine Depot warehouses won’t be used since Marine Depot used third parties to handle shipping and stocking and Ryan doesn’t want to leave quality control outside of the company at this time. But there is the need for more space and likely expansion for similar places for those warehouses with time.
 
Does Ryan still have complete control over inventory or is he influenced by Bertram Capital which likely cares more about profit than anything else?
 
AW1 said:
Does Ryan still have complete control over inventory or is he influenced by Bertram Capital which likely cares more about profit than anything else?
Click to expand...
Time will tell I suppose. Considering their growth and being a 1st generation company I doubt they got control of anything meaningful. Pretty tough to sell out your baby to new parents.
 
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