Tuesday, August 14th 2018
CaseLabs Withers Away After Losing PR Battle to Thermaltake
Premium aluminium case maker CaseLabs made a splash in 2015 when it accused Thermaltake of stealing many of its case designs to make "cheap Asian knock-offs." When faced with the prospect of a legal challenge by the much larger Thermaltake, CaseLabs this July withdrew its comments and publicly apologized to Thermaltake for it. Things didn't look up for the company after that. A deadly cocktail of the US-China trade-war, and the default of a large commercial loan account hit the company "at the worst possible time," it said in a statement. Failure to secure additional capital to stay afloat was the last straw.
Apparently, the import tariffs on a wide range of products manufactured in China raised prices for CaseLabs by "almost 80 percent," which cut deeply into the company's margins. The company has since stopped accepting orders, thanked its over 20,000 customers, and promised to fulfill as many of the pending orders as possible, while cautioning that it won't be able to fulfill all of them.
The full CaseLabs statement follows.
Apparently, the import tariffs on a wide range of products manufactured in China raised prices for CaseLabs by "almost 80 percent," which cut deeply into the company's margins. The company has since stopped accepting orders, thanked its over 20,000 customers, and promised to fulfill as many of the pending orders as possible, while cautioning that it won't be able to fulfill all of them.
We are very sad to announce that CaseLabs and its parent company will be closing permanently. We have been forced into bankruptcy and liquidation. The tariffs have played a major role raising prices by almost 80% (partly due to associated shortages), which cut deeply into our margins. The default of a large account added greatly to the problem. It hit us at the worst possible time. We reached out for a possible deal that would allow us to continue on and persevere through these difficult times, but in the end, it didn't happen.
We are doing our best to ship as many orders as we can, but we won't be able to ship them all. Parts orders should all ship, but we won't be able to fulfill the full backlog of case orders. We are so incredibly sorry this is happening. Our user community has been very devoted to us and it's awful to think that we have let any of you down. There are over 20,000 of you out there and we are very grateful for all the support we have received over the years. It was a great journey that we took together and we're thankful that we got that chance.
We understand that there will likely be a great deal of understandable anger over this and we sincerely apologize. We looked at every option we had. This is certainly not what we envisioned. Some things were just out of our control. We thought we had a way to move forward, but it failed and we disabled the website from taking any more orders.
It was a privilege to serve you and we are so very sorry things turned out this way.
16 Comments on CaseLabs Withers Away After Losing PR Battle to Thermaltake
For background and responsible multipage discussion, go here before coming back:
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/case-labs-closing-doors.246682/post-3884002
Better fact checking would have caught this. no assuming.
Main issues with the case.
1 Paint chips so freakn easy . ... you can sneeze near it and you will crack the paint .
2 Very over priced .. but i still did it
3 Dust ... their are no filters and their were no filters @ the time that were for it .. had to use these crappy 120 / 140 filters that were a pain in the ass.
Truth is I wish would of stuck with Lian li
Own 2 Caselabs cases, one horizontal mount, the other normal. The cases are roomy for liquid cooling, but there was just zero innovation over the years. For example, there were no USB 3.1 or type C connectors available for previously released cases, hard drive mounting system was old design and didnt use sleds - had to bolt screw mounts on, panel mounting could have evolved with inset holders, tempered glass...etc, they just weren't keeping up with design trends, and some of which were actually nice, not just bling RGB. Bottom line is there could have been so much done to keep current and diversify the business. Also, they could have made more realistically priced cases that appealed to more users out of traditional steel.
One poster mentioned issues with paint, never experienced a problem with the paint job, would have liked to seen a non-painted clean aluminum version. The filter issue is real, dmciflex makes filters for Caselabs and others so that really isnt an issue, but it wasnt included with the already expensive case.