This depends entirely on how profitable you are and how much of a good person you want to be and can afford to be and if there’s any chance at all that one of your employees might be running his/her own scam.
Personally, I’d give her a refund, donate the item to charity or throw it out, then make a special effort to keep an eye on the employee.
This wouldn’t be the first time and employee was running a scam like this.
Slightly different because I have a service business that sells parts, but I only accept returns for actual manufacturing defects, not damage, not price differences, not buyer’s remorse.
If they don’t like it, they can call someone else.
but also people expect returns to be free these days.
People expect a lot of things. They don’t always get what they want.
Because nobody will enforce your rights for you unless you can legally force them to, which requires a lot of money and quite often influence.
patents protect the right to sell in them?
TL/DR: Patents protect exactly nothing unless you have the clout to back them up.
how are they shutting you down and shortening the product lifetime?
Because you have no recourse.
Unless you’re multi-billion dollar corporation, you have zero influence in China and can’t stop them from doing whatever they feel like.
If you invent a widget and it costs you $20 to manufacture and you sell it for $40, there’s absolutely nothing that stops anybody or everybody in China from making it and selling it for $10.
You can get whatever you qualify for personally. If your personal credit sucks, the business card will be small or non-existent. If your personal credit is awesome, you’ll get a high limit.
In either case, you will be personally liable for 100% of the debt. The LLC means nothing.
Don’t give anything to anybody unless it’s acompanied by a court order signed by a judge.
As a 1099 you personally have all the liability if a customer gets drunk and injured or injures somebody else.
“Sorry. Trade secret”
I worked for a place that did that. There’s a break-even point where the cheap space becomes worth the cost of security, but 14,000 sqft isn’t it.
They had over 300,000 square feet and several dozen armed guards, but it still wasn’t any sort of bargain and eventually they closed.
Even if the property is free, it’s not worth the effort or the security costs, and bad areas are much more dangerous than they used to be. 20 years ago, someone might get robbed. Now there are routine drive-bys with automatic weapons.
You can easily find 14K SqFt somewhere that’s cheap and merely inconvenient, but won’t scare off the customers.
TL/DR: “Don’t do it”
Stop calling them cutting boards and charcuterie boards. Nobody wants an expensive cutting board that will get damaged and hardly anybody knows what charcuterie is and wouldn’t buy a board, but everybody knows what a cheese board is.
They’ll sell better as cheese boards.
Unless this is stupidly profitable, I’d sell the place and get on with my life.