Ideoli CEO, George Stroumboulis, sits down with Ideoli CPO, Chris Hartswick, to discuss.

GEORGE – Part of this craziness and everything that’s going on is people are price gouging. There are always going to be those people in those companies in those you know those angles of trying to take advantage of negative situations and one of them is just price gouging in general. Whether it is for face masks and critical items that are needed, we have that arena but we’re also seeing a trickling into our world when it comes to the air freight model. You are seeing it first hand and the quotes that we are dealing with and what is going on, it is actually disgusting on what they’re doing and why but let’s talk a bit about that.

CHRIS – Yeah it just seems, you know it seems like there is no control really. It’s no matter where you’re going whether you’re shipping product into Europe, South America the US obviously, North America everything just seems blocked, everybody seems to have it locked up. And now all of a sudden there’s surcharges and extra port fees and maintenance fees in and all these additional fees on there that are now causing our air freight to be 4 5 6, we’ve even seen almost 9 X on what it typically should be.

GEORGE – Taking advantage of the situation.

CHRIS – Blaming it on supply and demand. You know all the typical expected wording you would get from that, but I mean ultimately what it boils down to it is that price gouging.

GEORGE – And you know what, we can’t change what we can’t change but one thing we do here we’re not depend on one or two partners. It is a matter of having a handful of freight partners that we could go to and then go back to our clients and say instead of this option we could do this and what the sacrifices are. So having a dedicated team that are professionals in the global freight arena because that’s where we compete has helped us navigate this.