Manufacturing · Kids furniture
Rising freight never reached the price list.
This marketing & margin audit surfaced $72k in recurring annual margin in a Manufacturing business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 7 days.
The business
A flat pack kids' furniture maker held its list prices steady for roughly two years to stay competitive on shelf and online, a decision that felt commercially disciplined at the time. That same period, however, saw sustained increases in freight and packaging costs, precisely the inputs that decide whether a bulky, price sensitive product still earns money once it reaches the customer’s door.
What triggered the audit
Margin on the core flat pack lines had thinned steadily with no pricing change to explain it, the classic signature of cost creep the price list never absorbed. The audit rebuilt landed cost line by line, from current carrier invoices and packaging bills upward, rather than trusting the standard costs the pricing had originally been based on.
What the audit found
Two years of held prices had collided with two years of rising logistics costs, and the flat pack range absorbed the hit. Once current inbound freight, duties and, most damagingly, oversized carton surcharges were fully loaded into each unit, the true landed cost had climbed well past where the frozen list prices assumed it sat. Because flat pack children’s furniture is bulky and light, it is especially exposed to dimensional weight and oversized parcel surcharges, and those had risen sharply while the price list stood still. The result was margin quietly erased on every flat pack line, invisible because it lived in carrier invoices rather than in any pricing report. Across the range it added up to roughly $72k a year of margin lost to logistics inflation the prices never caught up with.
What we changed
Loaded current freight, duty and surcharge costs into unit economics and repriced the affected lines back to a healthy margin after two years of held prices.
Redesigned the packaging on the worst offenders to duck the oversized carton surcharge entirely, cutting the cost at source rather than only passing it on to customers.
Set a semiannual landed cost review tied to the carrier tariff schedule, so pricing can never again fall two full years behind rising logistics costs.
Prioritized the reprice and packaging redesign on the highest volume flat pack SKUs, where the surcharge exposure and the margin leak were greatest.
The result
The outcomes were measured for three months after a 90 day implementation period. $72k a year recovered by catching pricing and packaging up with two years of freight inflation, an annual figure equal to 12× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any manufacturer, holding list prices felt disciplined, yet oversized carton surcharges erased margin on every flat pack line the whole time. If you haven’t rebuilt landed cost since freight rose, your steadiest prices may be your quietest leak, and it grows with each tariff. It takes rebuilding cost from the carrier invoice up to see it. A fixed fee audit does that in days, before another year compounds the loss.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 7 days, inside our fixed 5–7 day window.
What the client said
$72k a year found in 7 days
Landed margin on the flat pack lines: −1% → +6%
“We held prices for two years and freight did not. Cristian rebuilt landed cost from current carrier invoices: oversized carton surcharges had erased the margin on every flat pack line. We repriced and redesigned the worst packaging.”
Cristian BragauSenior Auditor · signed this audit off