Matt McAdow was sitting on a cardboard box in a Montana warehouse, tapping out emails on a laptop and waiting for his shoes to arrive. It was Monday, September 18, 2023, a pivotal moment for Bedrock Sandals, a boutique footwear company headquartered in Missoula. The shoes, Bedrock’s first to be manufactured overseas, were supposed to have arrived four days earlier. McAdow, director of operations, had spent months coordinating photo shoots, producing marketing collateral, and figuring out how to fill a 10,000-unit order for Bedrock’s new mountain clogs—in three colors of suede and nubuck. Cofounder Dan Opalacz was excited that the rollout would occur a week before his first son was due to be born. “It was all lining up with these big work and life milestones,” he says. “Then everything backfired and created more work than I ever could have imagined.”

Unlike Bedrock’s other sandals, assembled by the company in California, the clogs were manufactured in Busan, South Korea, then sent to Los Angeles in a 40-foot shipping container, with the first batch arriving at Long Beach port on Monday, September 11. A total of 447 cartons were scheduled to be loaded into a truck for direct delivery to Bedrock’s warehouse outside Missoula by noon on Thursday, September 14, five days ahead of the biggest product launch in Bedrock’s 12-year history. But when noon arrived, with the ten-person warehouse team ready to receive, quality-check, and prep the inventory for shipping, the clogs were nowhere to be seen.

A message arrived from Landstar System, hired to oversee logistics, revealing that the truck had “mechanical issues” and would arrive by 8 A.M. the following day. This unfortunate news was accompanied by a screenshot of the truck’s location on Google Maps, just a few hours away. Friday morning came but the clogs did not, and McAdow says that the Bedrock crew went into the weekend “bummed, but not suspicious” about the spotty information they’d received. A Monday arrival would crunch QC time and possibly delay some orders, but they’d manage.

Monday again brought no truck, but there was an update from Landstar’s supposed “dispatcher,” who indicated that the driver’s phone was turned off. The dispatcher also relayed the unsettling possibility that the driver “likes to party” and sometimes drank a lot on weekends. This was the last straw as far as McAdow was concerned. He printed out photos of the driver’s license and of the blue and orange truck that had been provided by the shipping company, and scoured several truck stops in the Missoula area looking for his clogs. No luck. Nor were there signs of anyone at the pulloff where, according to the dispatcher, the driver had stopped to sleep. “I was concerned that this guy may have passed out or had a heart attack in some random yard,” McAdow says. A diesel mechanic across the street from the pulloff told him about a truck headed for Seattle that matched the description, but it turned out to be unrelated.

McAdow was now seriously worried that something shady was going on. He went home and, from his kitchen table, researched the driver’s name online, found his cell number, and dialed it. A voice answered. When McAdow identified himself as “Matt from Bedrock Sandals,” the man on the other end asked McAdow to call him back in ten minutes. He proceeded to give McAdow the runaround. Later that day, someone called from a Google Voice number with a Los Angeles area code. The new caller had a thick Eastern European accent and could barely be heard above the background noise. He said that he was in Salt Lake City, driving the truck with “the goods” inside. He explained that the previous driver had hired him to assume responsibility for the load, a frowned-upon but legal practice referred to as double brokering.