Talk about entry into enclosed trailers and then sort of walking away for it for a bit and then now really concentrating on that again.

yeah so back when we bought it in 2000 i think a couple years later we introduced the enclosed trailers and with the facility in bank bankrupt there wasn't a ton of room there and the enclosed trailers took up a lot of that space um And for the most part, we sold that enclosed trailer just in the Midwest because it's tough to get that shipping, especially beyond a certain amount of distance.

So back in 2013 and 14, when that facility in Emmitsburg came available, that's when we moved the enclosed trailers over that way.

And then, you know, we never, we had an awesome product, but it was designed probably not as production friendly as it should have been.

And we didn't probably have the expertise to manage that properly.

So when COVID hit, we were we were short people and we were short supplies and we had a demand not only on the enclosed trailers but on the open trailers our expertise was on the open trailer side so we made that decision to take the people that were building the enclosed trailers which is about double what would it would take wow that same amount of people to do open trailers and and we we gave the dealers a six month time frame to still buy them but then we transitioned out of the enclosed trailers at the end of 2021. we got some heat from our dealers but we still were able to manage the business on the open side and still take care of the dealers and still be busy enough.

And then recently we just got bought out by a partner called Nove is the trailer brand company within Bright Star and they have enclosed trailers in their portfolio mainly steel trailers so we figured well let's utilize their expertise and it's a partnership So we just unveiled the new enclosed trailers at the show in Nashville, the first part of September, just a few weeks ago.

Are there any glimmers or signs in the market, either on the price of aluminum on a market pickup, an uptick for you so that you're selling more?

I mean, th- there are a lot of options.

Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of options, and, you know, we've got three or four pretty strong regional competitors, and then we've got a couple other competitors that, uh, service the whole United States like we, we do.

But I think our advantage is that our dealers, um, even they directly talk to the consumer, and us being in the distribution business before, um, we couldn't control what manufacturers do.

The beauty of Aluma is we're selling it to the dealers, and dealers will have that feedback from the customer as far as if our product needs to change or if we need to incorporate a new model.

Um, so we listen to the dealers from the consumer feedback and from the dealer feedback, and that's really where we've got a lot of our information on new products and changes to existing products.

Um-

It's monthly, right?

Yeah, we do a monthly meal, and we've done this for probably the last 15 years, and it's changed a little bit as of now.