The problem is meeting the supply. Purely in theory does low supply and high demand equal increased margins. When you increase the margins you see the sellers raise the price or else not carry as much of your product. When the price goes up you are competing with more premium names with a stronger brand image. If an Anderson lower cost as much as a BCM I'd just get the BCM to avoid the stigma if nothing else.

And at some point you are at the capacity of what you can build. There's a lot of steps in the process of building a lower, from the actual machining to the anodizing. Usually some aspect of the process is contracted out, for example the castle nuts might not be made in house. If there's a single supply chain crunch then the whole process grinds to a halt. You can't ship parts kits if you are missing detents, you can't complete a lower if you're missing end plates or castle nuts. A lot of companies start to bring that manufacture in house but that also requires investment in tooling, materials, personnel and workspace.

If you need capital to expand operations to meet demand but don't have any flowing in because you can't produce enough to meet demand then you have a few options to get the money but all of them involve you owing people. Those people tend to want to get paid back, and if you aren't bringing in enough revenue because you don't have enough to sell to pay off the credit you took to expand operations then you end up in a spiral where you lay people off and restructure to reduce costs but can't still can't produce the product to get you out of the hole.

Many businesses have fallen to this, and it's way worse if you took out the credit during a market boom but have to pay it off during a market bust. 2024-2025 was a bad year for the firearms industry because even with an election everyone was too tapped out or had already bought the guns they wanted to buy more, and there were so many deals on good stuff that it was hard to compete.