When SAL3 ceased selling, the demand for DermaHarmony soaps more than doubled. In normal times it takes around 12 weeks to acquire all of the necessary ingredients and packaging for a production run. The COVID-19 pandemic limited our production capacity.
We started the planning on the production run in April and were unable to complete the run until October. The August-October 2020 outage of the 10% Sulfur & 2% Salicylic Acid soap was directly related to this spike in demand and COVID-19.
The March-June 2021 outage of many products was caused by global shortages of raw ingredients, shipping container delays, packing film delays, and workers who were unwilling to return to work because of the pandemic. By the summer of 2021 the lead time had grown from 12 weeks to more than 30 weeks. Despite more than doubling our inventory levels in 2020, sales continue to outstrip supply.
As a response we've increased inventory on Sulfur and Salicylic Acid products by a factor of 4X since the start of the pandemic. We're hopeful that the pandemic will be behind us by the end of 2021 and things will return to normal.