I never would have thought that a regular Kinder Surprise could cost me my business and a fine of one and a half million dollars. The story happened about 8 years ago. I was just starting to sell decorative stickers on Amazon back then and had literally just connected the products a month ago. I already wrote a separate post about this earlier.
And then a client from the US writes to us saying, My kids watched unboxing videos on YouTube and are asking for Kinder Surprises. We do not have them in our stores, can you sell them to me? I was surprised and thought, why not? I went to the nearest store, bought 10 of them, calculated the shipping, and made a separate listing on Amazon for the client. I sent him the link, he bought them, I shipped them, and forgot about it.
The next morning I came to the office, and there were 10 more sales. Amazon had indexed the listing, and it showed up in search. I realized there was a demand. I immediately listed the Kinders on eBay and made sets of 5, 10, 20, and 50 pieces. Orders started pouring in like a river. I bought everything the wholesalers had, which was 6 huge boxes of 128 eggs each. In a couple of days, we packed and shipped over 600 Kinder eggs. It was a victory, we found a product where we could make a 50 percent margin. Hooray! But then the most unexpected thing happened.
On the third day, I got an email from Amazon saying, Your listing has been removed due to the sale of a prohibited item. A couple of hours later, the same email came from eBay. I was in shock. How could a chocolate egg that is sold in every kiosk be a prohibited item? I went on the internet to figure it out. And then I felt uneasy.
It turns out that since 1938, there has been a law in the US that bans the sale of food products where an inedible object is hidden inside an edible shell. It is believed that a child could bite into it and choke on the toy. Kinder Surprise fits this law perfectly, and it is officially banned from import. But the scariest part was yet to come.
I found out that the fine for importing one such egg can reach up to 2500 dollars. Plus confiscation and disposal at the sender's expense. We had over 600 eggs on the way. I quickly multiplied 600 by 2500 and turned pale, the result was an amount that would instantly bankrupt the company.
Okay, I need to do something urgently, I told myself!
Only 3 or 4 days had passed since shipping, the packages should not have left Europe yet. I urgently contacted Omniva support, explained the situation, and asked them to stop everything. Luckily, they managed to intercept the packages before they flew to the US. Within a month, all the packages were returned to our office.
The money for shipping, of course, burned up. We lost a few thousand euros, plus we gave all the clients a full refund. I was sitting in the office surrounded by a mountain of 600 Kinder Surprises, and I was happy that I got off so easily. Because if US customs had received that cargo, the conversation would have been completely different.
By the way, when we were left with this mountain of eggs, we had the idea to sell only the toys from them, without the chocolate.
But that is another story, which I will also tell later.
