Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
- Lao Tzu in The Tao Te Ching
Our greatest life lessons come to us through our challenges, don’t they? Sometimes taking a step back and looking at the big picture is comforting when you face big decisions.
It gives perspective and clarity that otherwise you would simply miss or never be on the same wavelength of.
We had this opportunity recently at Live Well 360.
Many of you know that our vision for our brand is to design and offer the best fitness and yoga bags available. We want to give people like you the best of the best in terms of quality, design, and function.
We are a little guy, being that it is just the two of us plus a small team of helpers, behind the scenes growing our company and spreading the word about our bags.
Over the past several months we have been secretly working to move our manufacturing from China to the US.
We had hopes that this would allow us to keep up with the demand for our bags more efficiently, meaning that we could place smaller orders and receive them in shorter time frames than our current 90 day lead time.
For many reasons, things didn’t pan out. This was a big disappointment for us at first, because on the surface it seemed as if US manufacturing was “the answer” to all our prayers.
In the past when things didn’t work out, our tendency would be to try to force it work out through action, pressure, and sheer will but… we’ve learned better.
As Lao Tzu explains above, ultimately force negates and so does taking action out of fear. Inspired action, on the other hand, is a different ballgame. So rather than force and pressure, we put our inspired-thinking caps on and have a different plan.
For the time being, we are switching over to a more streamlined approach and will be bringing in inventory one bag style at a time, in 1-2 color options, according to which bag is in demand most at that moment.
In other words, there is a good chance that we will only have one bag style in stock at any particular time versus having all three bags in stock all of the time.
In order to understand what Live Well 360 bag you (our customers) want most, we’ve created email sign up lists for each individual bag.
So, if you are interested in getting the Core or the Luxx, for example, you can sign up on that bag’s list and you will be the first to know when that particular bag is available. This allows us to gauge which bag style to bring into inventory next.
Our next order of inventory coming in will be for the Luxx, in Eggplant Purple and in our newest color option, Onyx Black!
We are expecting delivery late April early May.
If you are interested in getting yourself a Luxx in either of these colors, get on the list… or if you want to stay in the loop if/when the Luxx will be available in Graphite Gray again… get on the list!
If you are interested in the Core, make sure you sign up for the Core list, and we’ll let you know as soon as we have more coming in.
We want to keep all of our customers happy and we want to be able to offer all of the bag styles in various colors once again very soon, but until we’ve grown to that point, we are doing the best that we can.
We are committed to doing what it takes to continue to serve you best and to promise the best quality, design, function, and customer experience that we can give.
This is us being soft and yielding.
Our point in sharing this isn’t to bore you with the details of running a business…
Our intent is to share so that you can see how we handle the sometimes stressful situations of life that at the time feel like a big deal, yet in the end can turn out to be the best thing for you.
We all have our challenges—stress and challenges never disappear—but we always have a choice in how we decide to look at them.
We hope that this helps you to understand us a little better and also to perhaps see your own challenging situations in a different light. Being rigid and trying to force things isn’t the answer.
These moments of bending and allowing ourselves to go with the flow rather than pushing against it are what are going to allow us all to thrive the most.
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I am very excited for either the Luxx or Core in Eggplant Purple to come in—so far I cannot decide which one to get! I’m purchasing the bag to celebrate the weight loss I’m accomplished, and by the time they come in I hope to have maybe added another 10 pounds to that number
One thing though, so are you still trying to bring the manufacturing process to the US (and it’ll just take a little longer) or is that not in the cards at all? I think I missed that part.
Looking forward to the bags coming back and I appreciate the upfront notice about the status so I’m not, and others aren’t either, left wondering what’s going on.
The bags are gorgeous