The Cheese #48 🧀 - 3 Tractor Trailers of Survival Gear and a trip to Lisbon

Christmas is next week!

Into the final stretch of 2025! Christmas Party was a good time as always, great to see so many people that I do not see as often I would like!

Last week, we dropped a BattlBox Holiday Mystery Box. We created 300 of these boxes with a price tag of $250 and a value of over $400. Announced it’s existence on Wednesday and pushed traffic to the product page that was marked as sold out (but allowed you to be alerted when inventory was added via email or sms). The plan was to load inventory on Friday. We had some sort of communication breakdown and inventory was loaded in prematurely on Thursday. At that moment, we had about 600 notifications and go out and we sold the 300 boxes in a little over an hour. Not ideal for customer experience, but still a great addition to our month of December!

We have an interesting ‘opportunity buy’ on some survival gear. Three companies, all owned by the same person, recently went out of business with their inventory sitting in a 3PL. To be clear, this gear is likely NOT up to the BattlBox standard (assumption that none of this will end up in a future Mission Box) but it could be stuff we can sell on marketplace channels like Whatnot. About $600k worth of gear for $15k. Probably closer to $25k in costs after 3PL charges for removing the stuff out of their facility and costs of multiple tractor trailers driving it to our warehouse. A chunk of the inventory seems to also be stuff that we might just throw away but that $600k is the old owner’s cost so retail on this stuff likely totals a decent bit over $1M on the low end. Seems like a safe gamble.

Membership - Levels dropped a little bit lower than we would like in the past week so pushing our advertising a little bit more than expected/needed previously.

Extracted - We are partnering with Fox again for their hit show Extracted (Season 2). We did a collaboration launch with them last year and made a special edition Extracted BattlBox that got sent out to all of the show’s contestants and several influencers and creators. Excited to be partnering with them for their new season! More details coming soon.

Amazon and Whatnot are both tracking to have amazing months. As we sit right now, both have the potential to set record months, but it’s too early for either to be a lock at such. On the Whatnot front, after some help from Amer @ Praella, we are almost ready to launch version 2.0 of our Whatnot Tool that we created in Loveable. The first version had a handful of glitches but with Amer’s help this new version should be almost glitchless. We welcomed a new Whatnot host and showrunner both this week. Ronnie hosted his first show on Tuesday and Amy ran her first show Wednesday morning. Cool to see the team growing and love the potential that both Ronnie and Amy will bring to our channel. 

As we plan out 2026, we made the tough decision that we need focus exclusively on BattlBox. As we close out this year, we will end our involvement in 2 joint ventures. One will be shut down completely and the other we will simply divest from.

Next up is Christmas and then Colleen, Johnny, and I will be heading to Lisbon for a week the day after Christmas. Previously, we would do a trip every last week of the year (our Anniversary is the 28th of December) and it would serve as our anniversary and Christmas present to each other (experiences over physical items). We ended up cancelling our 2023 trip (because Colleen was pregnant) and did not have one in 2024 (since Johnny was so little). 

Let’s get into the rest!

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RIP Roomba

Eric Carlson stops by to unpack iRobot (Roomba) filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Any time Eric has some lessons to share, I listen!

Michael Jordan History

Lhea drops some knowledge on how Michael Jordan built his $3.5B fortune. The GOAT!

That’s a Wrap on This Week’s Cheesy Scoop! 🧀

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Until next time, stay melty, stay merry, and keep it extra cheesy!

With warm queso vibes,
Team Online Queso