As is well known a tragic series of events began to unfold in Europe, back in February of 2014 when Russia began the illegal takeover and annexation of Crimea, and later in February 2022 unleashing a full scale ground invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine.
The ethical, moral, legal and humanitarian wrongs that have been committed are shocking and deplorable and Russia needs to be punished whilst Ukraine needs our help.
The right thing to do, isn’t always the easy thing to do.
Many countries, and trading blocks stepped up and immediately began to introduce punitive sanctions against Russia, getting harder and stronger with each incremental step. Sanctions have been aimed at Russia’s imports and exports, their banking and their trading.
These sanctions sent an clear and unambiguous message to Moscow. Whatever it costs, we will do the right thing. And yes, there was a cost. The financial impact of sanctions and feared retaliatory supply cuts in the energy sector had a major impact on a painful rate of inflation.
And among many other sanctions related issues which economists will be discussing for decades, there was one very sad story for us and our colleagues.
Since the seed of an idea was planted some five years ago, through to it’s germination into a fully initiated project, our team here at The Natural Intimacy Brand along with colleagues external to our organisation, have put our hearts into a major, defining project: Natural Intimacy Vegan Condoms.
Having completed the full process of product design and prototyping we began the pre-production process. This involved ordering materials to be custom made which was no easy task during lock-down, with a 3 month turn around for these materials becoming 24 months!
After weathering these delays, the essential materials were delivered to our partner factory, CPR Gmbh in Germany, who were at the time the largest manufacturer of condoms in Europe. Just as we received our first samples of product, Vladimir Putin entered, stage right.
The first waves of sanctions were placed against Russia, it’s regime and it’s economy. At that point CPR GmbH hit problems. An estimated 25% of it’s business was with Russia and it had many open, pending invoices with Russian clients which suddenly could not be settled. The dominos began to fall and sadly CPR Gmbh went into insolvency.
For the employees and dependent suppliers it was a massively impactful event. To many, life changing. Loosing a job or a client in the middle of economically unstable times is an awful situation to be in. To us here it was impactful too, on a much smaller scale, but it still stung – we had to shelve our vegan condom product.
Let’s be straight, CPR GmbH was another innocent victim of the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is no more to say on this issue.
Here, we have the option to take our product design to an alternative manufacturer for production, we’re sure we could find one who meets our high ethical standards whilst being able to maintain quality and a workable price point. However we’ve decided to step back for a time to observe the ripples in the market with the insolvency of Europes largest condom manufacturer. Additionally with Brexit related issues, there are new regulatory requirements on the importation of condoms to the UK, an important market for us, something which would also cause ripples in the UK market which would need observing.
If you happen to be an ethical condom manufacturer who would like to partner with us, feel free to get in touch and we can discuss if now is the right time to move forwards.
For two decades David has been the owner and director of several marketing and distribution companies. During this time he has learned the indisputable benefits of looking after customers, colleagues, workers, suppliers and the local community, treating them all as respected stakeholders in a common project. Recently he consolidated his personal beliefs and business ethics by founding the Natural Intimacy brand and developing it as an Ethical Company.
