For people who build their own computers from the motherboard up, there’s a new reason to hate Donald Trump’s senseless tariffs. California Fabrication Company, parent company of CaseLabs, announced this weekend that they were closing down operations, in large part to the popular vote loser’s budding trade war. The announcement came via a statement posted on their website Saturday.
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.
It was a privilege to serve you and we are so very sorry things turned out this way.
PCGamer states the obvious:
CaseLabs is likely referring to the growing number of tariffs being enforced on Chinese imports by the United States government. China and the US are currently engaged in a trade war, causing many US companies to lose money, lay off employees, or close entirely.
California Fabrication was founded in 1971 as an enclosure manufacturer that served multiple industries. They only got into the PC tower case game in 2010, quickly winning over folks who design their own machines from scratch, with stunning boxes that were easy for users to modify as they built their dream machines.
Proudly American in both ownership and operation, the company quickly found popularity among DIY computer enthusiasts.
The closure, which the company claims was sped along by a major consumer default, means the company won’t even be able to fulfill all of its current orders. So don’t expect any fire sales.
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.
Fans of the company are paying tribute on Twitter by posting pics of their beloved CaseLabs builds, while Trump supporters are storming comment sections to post about “libtards” who don’t know how to run businesses.
The 47-year-old family-owned company, based in Canoga Park, a neighborhood in northwest Los Angeles, has about twenty employees.