LaJobi sells wooden cribs under the Bonavita, Babi Italia, Europa Baby, Nursery 101, kathy ireland Baby, and LittleMissMatched brands, but it's one of their outside clients, Graco, that makes this story so interesting. It seems the brands for which LaJobi manufactures (read: imports) cribs have been bringing in their Chinese stock without paying the import taxes designed to combat predatory pricing practices by Chinese manufacturers. So what's predatory pricing? It isn't just pricing things lower than your competition can afford to charge. It's pricing them either below what you charge in your own home country, or below what it actually costs you to manufacture the product. Either way, it's the intention that drives the bus: Undercutting pricing and taking a hit in a market is a long-term strategy to wipe out competitors and clear the floor for your own, real, pricing to come in. And it's what appears to have been happening with LaJobi's Chinese-imported cribs under CEO Larry Boniva's watch.

On Tuesday LaJobi's parent company, Kid Brands, fired Boniva as well as a managing director. Boniva actually co-founded LaJobi in 1994, and was appointed its president in 2008. Kids' Today Online writes:

The U.S. Department of Commerce implemented duties on Chinese-made wooden bedroom furniture in 2005 to address what the government determined was unfair pricing tactics of Chinese producers. The duties are aimed at leveling the playing field for American wood bedroom manufacturers that have suffered from unfairly priced imports. The duties are assigned to various Chinese factories, but are paid by importers such as LaJobi. On the basis of the investigation, the board concluded that there was misconduct involved on the part of certain LaJobi employees in connection with the incorrect payment of duties, including misidentifying the manufacturer and shipper of products. The ongoing investigation is also focusing on certain of LaJobi's business and staffing practices in Asia.

To parse that out for you, the import duties vary by Chinese manufacturer - in fact, they range from zilch/zero up to 216% of the wholesale price. And it's the importer who pays. That makes misrepresenting what company your cribs were purchased from a winning way to reduce your import duties, and that's what happened on Bonavi's watch, to the tune of $7 million in dodged duties.

Of course, those very practices may explain how LaJobi earned the Baby Furniture Plus Association's 2010 award for "Best in Shipping, Service, and Value."

U.S.-based crib manufacturers (Pacific Rim Woodworking is one fine example) have been struggling to compete with a tide of curiously inexpensive Chinese imports for years. There are even weirder shenanigans afoot that we can't claim to completely understand. But the current situation is that the Department of Commerce has initiated a review of the regulations, even after the International Trade Commission approved the extension of the import duties through the middle of this decade just last year. (Armchair industry wonks can settle into a comfy chair with the 200-page report [pdf].) Coincidentally, the DOC has been heavily petitioned by furniture manufacturers, retailers, and their lawyers to gut the regulations.

So this firing comes at a strange time. It's hard to infer exactly how this investigation evolved, or how cleaning house might serve LaJobi as this battle heats up. But the fact that the investigation was initiated by Kid Brands' own board is a good thing, pure and simple, and the company chose to move aggressively by firing the guy for whom the buck (literally) stopped for at least the three years during his tenure as LaJobi's CEO. To his successor, one-year Sassy president Rich Schaub (who will retain the presidency of Sassy to boot), we say good luck. You're going to need it.