Adjusting to Supply Chain Issues Ahead of Holiday Season Demand

 

Keypoints:

  • With the holiday two months away, companies are still dealing with supply chain issues.
  • Businesses have been preparing but are still plagued with shortages.
  • Chessgammon has found that their orders have been taking 9-10 months.

Commentary:

The holiday season is almost upon us. If they haven’t already been, businesses should be preparing for that rush of consumers to hit their stores and websites. But this holiday season is still not typical, with supply chain issues plaguing every industry, causing either a shortage or a delay in goods. MarketScale’s Justin Honore talked with Rizwan Girach, Founder of Chessgammon, a company that makes handmade chessboards and pieces, the type of challenges this supply chain issue can bring to a product that already requires a lot of time to complete.

Abridged Thoughts:

In terms of what we found due to the demand of the pandemic, we found that obviously there’s a huge range of products we get in. More specifically, I’ll talk about the chess pieces that are a more classic example because they’ve been the ones affected the most (by the holiday season supply chain issues).

So, I’ll just briefly explain how a chess piece tends to be manufactured. You’ve got essentially a block of wood that gets dried over a considerable number of months that then gets crafted by a manufacturer. A lot of these craftsmen, during the pandemic, were either off as a result of COVID or, due to restrictions in India, where they are made, the government locked down the city where work was entirely at a standstill.

This meant that a lot of what we would have come in over a period of about three months or so, we’ve found that it’s taking upwards of about nine to ten months to get in potentially. So many of the orders we had placed in November or October last year, we would’ve expected them to arrive by February to March.

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Image

Latest

human-centered
How Human-Centered Design Led to a Startup Accelerator for Education: A Conversation with Transcend Network’s Co-founder Michael Narea
June 20, 2025

The convergence of human-centered design and education innovation is reshaping how edtech ventures emerge and scale. As AI enables hyper-efficiency and bootstrapped entrepreneurship becomes more viable, the real differentiator is empathy—founders who listen deeply to users before building solutions. A McKinsey study of 300 public companies found that design-led organizations significantly outperformed their peers, with…

Read More
care navigation
AI-Powered Care Navigation Reduces Healthcare Spend and Improves Patient Access
June 20, 2025

The U.S. healthcare system is strained by rising costs, uneven quality, and fragmented care navigation. Employers are bearing the brunt, spending more without always securing better care for their teams. According to the RAND Corporation, one effective strategy is to “change their network and benefit designs to encourage patients to use lower‑priced, higher‑value providers…

Read More
edge computing
Building the Wireless Future: Low-Power IoT, Edge Computing, and the End of the Gs
June 19, 2025

As the global race to 6G heats up, telecom providers, governments, and tech companies are investing billions to advance the next generation of hyperconnected infrastructure. European operators urge regulators to release more spectrum to stay competitive, while U.S. programs like the USDA’s ReConnect have funneled over $1 billion into rural fiber backhaul. Meanwhile, companies like…

Read More
healthcare operations
Healthcare Operations Improve with AI That Unites Data, Automation, and Ethics
June 18, 2025

Generative AI has captured the public imagination, but its most transformative use cases may lie far from flashy consumer tools. In healthcare operations, where complexity, inefficiency, and fragmentation remain persistent challenges, AI is now driving measurable improvements. Research suggests AI-enabled healthcare systems could cut administrative costs by up to $360 billion in the U.S. alone….

Read More