
Entering the last stage of our Knops adventure
18 Dec '2017 KnopsWhat a ride!
Hi you! This post is directed straight to you. Whether you are a backer on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, a buyer through our webshop, a distributor, a fan, or just stumbled upon this message by accident. We would love to ask just a bit of your time.
For us, the last couple of years have been devoted to making Knops, our dream, reality. And now we are nearing that realization of our dream. And without you guys, that would have never been possible. We are very grateful for that and feel very obligated to deliver our product as soon as possible. But also, that is hard…
It takes time
The thing is that Kops is an entirely new product. We have been (trying to) give you information on when we are able to deliver our product, and even now, that is very difficult. And that is one of the main reasons for this update because we want you to understand why.
We are setting up high-quality test equipment for quality control and expect to have this 100% functional next week. In quality control, it’s quite common to test products sample-wise. But for the first production batch, we’re going to test every single pair of Knops for every different setting. In this critical first stage of production, we want to make sure that all products are fully functional in order to provide everyone with a high-quality premium product.
Now, we understand that you are all waiting for a definite date as to when your pair of Knops will be delivered. Why is this so hard? Well, the whole process of testing and perfecting your pair of Knops is a very detailed engineering part of the pre-production and also depends on the feedback that comes out of these testing phases. The test results of our samples from the first batch will give us feedback whether or not that batch is 100% perfect. Then we might have to finetune, and retest, re-adjust etcetera. This process might be just hours, or it might take up to 2 weeks.
It could be that the first batch is immediately perfect. However, there is always a possibility for things to arise. That is why the entire engineering team is going to be onsite during the production batches, to ensure a quick response time to any possible test feedback that might indicate a necessary last fine tuning.
We are telling you this to be as clear and transparent as possible, and hope you understand why we can’t give a definite date as to when we will be delivering your pair of Knops to you.
So what can we say?
Well, in our last update, we told you that we were exploring options to scale the production capacity. In order to do this, we have to purchase an extra ultrasonic welding machine. We expect to have good news about this next week. If so, it’s easier to set up the delivery schedule, so we can be clear about when you can expect your pair of Knops. We are still on schedule to ship the first orders in January. We are confident it stays that way. By the way, we are posting weekly updates on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. You can check those pages for more regular updates every week.