Bitter and Sweet

Take the bitter with the sweet. Prov. Accept adversity as well as good fortune, as in: If you intend to get married, you must be prepared to take the bitter with the sweet. This idiom is dating from the late 1300s. It was first recorded in John Heywood’s 1546 proverb collection. (The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary).

A couple of weeks passed by and we are eager to update you on everything we’ve been working on. This is going to be a big update so after reading you will know exactly where we are on our Infento journey, where we are going and when. We have a lot of positive things to share with you but unfortunately as you could probably deduct from the title and the first paragraph not every topic will be a good news show this time.

When our backers (please read this in first person “you” when you backed us) chose to support us on Kickstarter we got into some sort of a relationship. Let’s say we entered into a marriage, a Kickstarter marriage.

Our relationship is much more than just one that can be typified as consumer/producer. Our backers showed faith in us and our product. Because of the support of all the backers we got the opportunity to develop the Infento kits for the consumer market. We are extremely thankful for this. But like the idiom from the first paragraph noted about a marriage: unfortunately it’s not all sweetness. Although we sure wished and worked extremely hard to be the perfect flawless partner!

Since the start of the journey we only got positive news to share, but now we have a little bit more bitter information. Ok, so what kind of lemon juice are we serving you?…Well, we have to move the expected shipment date. We tried everything in our power to follow our first timeline, but a couple of developments caused too much delay. We will give you more details about these issues later on in this newsletter.

What are the new shipment expectations? We did a thorough check on every aspect in the complete chain from production to shipping. We now expect our European orders to ship between the 15th and 31st of March 2016. The shipment of our orders in the USA is expected between the 20th and 30th of April. For the rest of the world it really depends where the kits must go. The way we see it now is between the 20th of March and the 15th of May. This is a broad range, but it really depends on the destination of course. Please drop us an e-mail if you would like a delivery estimate for your specific country. We sincerely apologize for the delay!

We checked if other Kickstarter projects also experienced delays to see how we compared. It looks like this is quite common unfortunately. According to research of CNN 84% of the top 50 projects in tech, design and games delayed on their shipment. The median delay is two months. And research from the University of Pennsylvania with a sample of 471 tech and design projects showed 75% of the projects didn’t ship on time.

With everything we do, we try to under-promise and over-deliver. So we really wanted to fall in the positive 16% category of CNN and the 25% of UPenn that did manage to ship in time. But nope, we have to go with the broad majority this time. Again, our apologies.

Before we explain in detail why we have to change the shipment date, we first want to show you the time table that we shared with you on Kickstarter, so you remember our original schedule:

So where did the hiccup come from? We have had issues with our angle limiter, u-block and big skis. Let’s start with the angle limiter. This is a completely new part for us. It is an important part for most of the Junior rides and it will be included in all our kits. The angle limiter gives the ride a maximum angle while steering. This prevents kids to make turns that are too sharp.

In our last update we told you that we received the first angle limiters and that they fit perfectly. Well, that part was correct, but after more thorough testing we concluded that the chance of breaking them is a little bit too high.

This was not what we expected. We feverishly tried new materials (rubber, aluminum, glass fiber grains enforcement) in the hope for a quick solution as you can see above. That didn’t work. The only solution is to make a thicker angle limiter of 5mm in stead of 2mm. But the thicker limiter doesn’t fit on the ride anymore…. This means we had to change the so called u-block (this is where the limiter is positioned) as well and we were forced to throw away 7,500 u-blocks… The problem is that we need to wait weeks before the production of all the new angle limiters and u-blocks are finished. Yes, indeed, a real bummer!

This is not the only setback. The Big Ski Add-on is also a new product we invented for our Kickstarter and the consumer market. Here you can see the ski used on our Skibock:

A couple of months ago we found a very good (so we thought) Chinese manufacturer of a ski that falls between a normal ski and a snowboard. Multiple e-mails went back and forth. Multiple phone calls. References checked out. The real sample we received at our HQ looked perfect. All lights were on green. Then suddenly a couple of weeks ago the first faint signs started to appear that they maybe couldn’t deliver in time, although they didn’t say that to us in a direct way. In China it is very hard to get a definite no for an answer. The Chinese have a tendency to speak in a vague and indirect manner. We are aware of these cultural differences because we have many suppliers from China for our education kit, but we have nothing experienced something like this before.

We decided to not listen to vague promises anymore and after a long search (it’s snow season and everybody is in full production of skis) we found a manufacturer that still has a gap in their production and can help us out. It is double the price and it will kill our margins on the Big Ski Snow Add-on for this batch, but we don’t want any further delays.

The problem with getting some parts from China is the transport time. Simply said: you put stuff in a container and put it on a boat.

It takes the boat more or less 30 days to cruise to the harbor of Rotterdam (West Coast USA takes 20 days and East Coast 30 days). But handling and custom clearance on both sides can take up to 2 weeks. So you are looking at 6 weeks. Let’s say you ordered a part and you receive it in 6 weeks. Oops, although you did a quality control in China, something nevertheless is wrong with your parts. If you need to get new parts you first have to produce the new and improved version and then ship them again with a slow container ship….  And there you have your delay…

Would we be a little late in our shipment without these problems? We will be honest and fully transparent (which we pledged to be with Infento when we started the company) and say, yes, where we stand today, we would. But not by much, we think around 3 or 4 weeks. Producing 10 times more product than your funding goal is quite a challenge. But a challenge we happily take on. We will give you a little bit more insight on the scope of the challenge later on in this update.

With the knowledge of hindsight would we have done things differently? Yes, we would have. We would have communicated a shipment date that allowed us a little bit more time to handle unexpected issues. We already produce and deliver our education kit to schools since 3 years. We have a lot of experience in making our kits. And this gave us confidence to work with the timeline we showed you.

This year we invented new kits and add-ons for the consumer market. New parts to complete our Junior Kit and Snow and E-drive Add-on needed to be produced. We gave ourselves 4 weeks for unexpected issues in this regard but in hindsight we should have given ourselves a bit more time…

We want to give you a little bit more insight into our production challenge and also show you pictures of finished parts. Our founder Spencer visited China this month to check up on our suppliers and to see if the production was on track. He liked what he saw.

Around 750 kits were ordered on Kickstarter. We doubled this amount because we want to have inventory once we go live with our online store. This means we have to produce and assemble 1.500 kits. And in one kit you can find many, many parts.

It takes one and a half minutes to produce one of these. The injection molding machine can make two of these at the same time. So one machine would have to do 25,000 rounds for our order. Our supplier went a little bit nuts when he heard of our order. And he immediately put three extra machines to work to get everything done in time.

All these parts need to be stored in boxes. One kit has several boxes and they are quite large. Remember, we produce life-size stuff :-). The width of the main box is 105cm wide and the depth is 43cm. The height depends on the kit. We ordered 11,500 boxes and all of these need to be filled with beautiful Infento parts. We will show you pictures of these in a later update.

In our previous newsletter we already mentioned that we needed 5 miles or 8 kilometer of aluminum for the Kickstarter orders. Since we doubled the order, we are talking about 10 miles, or 16 kilometer of aluminum. All this aluminum needs to be cut and lasered in our assembly location in The Netherlands before we can ship it to the rest of the world.

And one last one. How many containers can we fill with all these parts? Not one. Not two. Not three. But five of them. Picture five Infento containers that cross the ocean to eventually arrive at your doorstep. Not the containers, but your desired kit of course.

Here are some pictures that Spencer snapped when he was in China: