Valentine's Day may be as tacky as holidays come, but we wanted to take this week to talk about something WE love: Our Renewed Program.
If all you care about is getting a super-low price on a previously loved ModMic, please click here and buy one! Sadly Renewed Units are only available to US shipping destinations. Why? Well...
Let me walk you through what this program is and why we do it, and hopefully by the end we'll have explained why.
What is a Renewed ModMic, exactly?
Almost every returned ModMic in the US is sent to our facility in Illinois where it goes through three main steps:
- Check for physical damage
- Test that it works without malfunctions
- Re-kit it into new packaging, including all new parts like base clasps.
Does this make Antlion more than new products?
The short answer is... no. Not really. We price our Renewed products so that the blended average value and cost of a unit nets us approximately the same as if we had sold them as new. Priced lower and we'd make less from selling a Renewed unit over a new one.
How the heck is that possible!?
The sad reality is in order to get a renewed unit up to snuff it takes multiple legs of shipping and a lot of human contact. A simple example is an Amazon return. Not only do the units need to be returned to Amazon by you, but then shipped from Amazon to our facility in IL, where those three steps have to be done carefully by a human, then the unit needs to be shipping back into our main supply chain, usually to our KY warehouse. That's a lot of extra shipping and extra human hours, so the cost really adds up: And remember not every unit shipped to IL passes those tests, but we still have to pay for them to be shipped, tested, and disposed of if they fail!
So what's the point?
Despite the extra shipping steps, it's still a massive benefit for the environment. This isn't just the amount of trash in the pile or a recycling program that throws out most of what you send, but a near elimination of parts and materials used. ModMics contain a lot of stuff we should try our best not to throw in the trash, such as rare earth magnets, Lithium batteries (Wireless only), copper, and a variety of plastics, just to name a few. We want to be clear this doesn't make us saints, we're not doing this for good PR or marketing (we're not turning it down either). We do it because it really makes an impact on our footprint as a company and we've proven over the nearly 2 years of operating the program we can do it without sacrificing a dime.
Why not expand it beyond the US?
Well, hopefully you get the idea now that this is in part a numbers game. It's one thing to ship a box of mics from Illinois to Kentucky. It's a whole different thing to send one from Illinois to Europe or beyond. Not only is the cost significantly higher, but the CO2 footprint is much larger as well. Tack on the additional and different regulations in different countries and it starts costing us more for a renewed unit than it does for a new one. Additionally we simply don't have the volume of returned units to justify selling in more locations... at least not yet.
Our hope is both supply and demand for renewed products gets high enough that we can do local(ish) Renewed units in the EU market next. If that's something you want, drop by our Discord and let us know.
Wrap it up already!
We wanted to take this time to really explain what this program does and why we do it, again not so we can be seen as some kind of corporate do-gooder (We're not sure such a thing really exists), but so you can understand the real value you gain by purchasing a Renewed unit. Yes, you save some money, but you also reduce nearly all the waste associated with making a ModMic, and we don't lose anything in the process. If that's not a win/win we don't know what is, and that's why we love our Renewed program!