Notice
Custom Reptile Habitats (Worldwide Brands Direct LLC DBA Custom Reptile Habitats) is closing its doors forever.
CustomReptileHabitats.com was launched over 8 years ago and during this time has fulfilled over 25,000 orders and received countless 5-star reviews and industry wide praise for its high quality, USA made products, innovative designs and outstanding customer service.
Our USA made reptile enclosures experienced phenomenal growth and in late 2021, Custom Reptile Habitats expanded its operations into a second building, hired more employees, took on additional business loans and purchased additional equipment to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for its products.
By mid-2022, a large US retailer changed the name of their look alike, Chinese-made enclosures to Reptile Habitats, and began dumping thousands of units each month into the USA market, at just above cost. While this move had a big impact on the enclosure sales for Custom Reptile Habitats, it took almost a year before Custom Reptile Habitats became fully aware of the vast sales numbers of these cheap Chinese-made enclosures, and the impact that they were having on our industries overall sales. By now we estimate that this competitor alone has taken away over $2,000,000 per year in lost sales from Custom Reptile Habitats.
Once we became aware of how much our enclosure sales were being affected by the cheap, Chinese imports, we decided that we needed to right size our operations and that the Maximum Reptile brand needed to diversify with more offerings for other market segments. In order to do this, Maximum Reptile became a separate company, trademarked its name, launched a new website and several new designs were launched.
2023 also saw an oversupply of reptiles, and widespread reports of other small businesses that were also impacted by the slower USA economy, with massive price increases of raw materials that are now considerably more than what they were just two or three years ago.
We finished 2023 with around $200,000 in new loans to help us transition into a new, more diverse business model. Unfortunately, our lenders changed the payment terms at the beginning of 2024 and during most of 2024, our loan payments were gobbling up over 25% of our gross sales revenue.
Like most small businesses, 2024 has been challenging with fewer sales, higher costs, and we had some lengthy delays in receiving the unique raw materials that we use to manufacture our products as well. These events pushed our average lead times back, resulting in fewer sales and higher than usual cancellations.
Despite these challenges, we remained fully committed to fulfilling all orders and all order cancellations and we had aggressive plans in place to catch up on all outstanding orders and commitments before the end of 2024.
Surprisingly, in early September a few disgruntled customers took matters into their own hands and began a sustained defamation campaign against our company, with the stated goal of driving customers away, and forcing Custom Reptile Habitats out of business. The campaign included contacting our hosting company, our credit card processors, our suppliers and several influencers that we have worked with over the years as well as posting negative “warnings” in countless reptile related groups.
This has been very effective and yet ironic that the very complaint that they had, would have been taken care of months ago had they not gone online with malicious lies, conspiracy theories and outright defamation against our company and its reputation. The results over the first month alone caused us to cease all sales on CustomReptileHabitats.com, and has since driven away hundreds of thousands of dollars of crucial sales, within the last 3 months of 2024.
We never thought we could be cancelled online and are devastated to realize that a few disgruntled customers with an unfair vendetta can have such a devastating effect on our small business. It hurts us deeply to think that the hard work we have put into looking after our customers and building a good reputation over almost a decade, can be overturned by a tiny minority of trolls. And sadly, it seems there’s nothing we can do about it.
For this latest challenge, we sincerely apologize to all of our wonderful customers that have been patiently waiting for their orders. We can ride out a slow year, we can adapt to new competition and we can endure crippling loan payments and higher costs but… being cancelled is not something that most small businesses could survive. These outrageous tactics severely delayed our customer refunds and backorders, under this flawed “burn it to the ground’ strategy that some chose to instigate against us.
We have during this time tried to secure new bridging loans, and looked for new investors too, but with all of the lost revenue, and negative posts, and inaccurate comments against Custom Reptile Habitats, we are now faced with the difficult decision to just close down and liquidate Custom Reptile Habitats.
We sincerely apologize to all that have been affected by these unfortunate circumstances. We have over the last 8 years tried to offer the very best USA made reptile enclosures and accessories and we are devastated by these recent events.