October Fulfillment Update

October Fulfillment Update

OK Team,

We’re back with another post - we’re going to detail what’s happening in our manufacturing operation, the customer feedback we’re getting, and how we’re taking that feedback into account to make sure you have the best possible experience with your Palette.

In the past month we had the personnel on our assembly team cycle a bit more than we’d hoped. A few individuals went to continue their education, and one was brought on to our engineering design team. This left a bit of a manpower issue over the month of September, which decreased our output a bit more than we’d hoped.

Since the beginning of August, we’ve been able to manufacture and pass about 80 Palettes. 38 Palettes were built in the last 30 days – a number substantially less than our goal.

To fix this issue, we went out and are growing our manufacturing team from 3 to 5 people (full time), plus one part time person. It’s taken a bit more time than we had originally hoped; however, we’re on the path to getting our output back up. This team is ramping up over the next week.

Below you can see some pictures of Palettes that have passed our QC processes and are ready to ship out, as well as some of the new component shipments we’ve received.

Palettes passed QC waiting to be boxed

Big sheet metal order that arrived in September

As a company we’re always looking to get feedback on Palette’s different areas – hardware, firmware and software – in order to make improvements. We’ve spoken to a number of our early users and have heard about their successes, as well as some of the areas they’re having issues.

Back when we shipped our initial units at the end of March, some of our backer community had issues with setting up their Palette, calibration, and printer profiles. The initial product onboarding and setup. We’ve since created a quick start video, a new quick start guide, and added an onboarding process to Chroma (Palette’s Software).

We’re also doing some work around splicing optimization for to cover as wide of variety of filament suppliers as possible, and other firmware improvements. If you haven’t already done so, download the latest version of Chroma. More to come on this in the future.

We’re in the process of making additional setup videos which will be released in the coming weeks.

Now, we wanted to take a second to highlight some of the prints that have come off of Palettes from our backer community. These prints have been showcased by backers in our Slack channel, where users are speaking about their experiences, and showing off some of their successes.

Photo Credit to Slack User @whttigress

Photo Credit to Slack User @mwhatch

Photo Credit to @Jetguy

We'll continue to post backer prints on our updates (assuming they're shared publicly), if you have one you'd like to send our way we'd love to take a look!

Filament and Filament Storage Solutions:

We have an announcement to make regarding anyone who purchased Filament Storage Solutions, or our Ultimate Package (Filament + Filament Storage Solutions).

Anyone who paid extra for Filament Storage Solutions or Filament from our campaign will be issued a refund for the price of these additional items. ($60 for Filament Storage Solutions, or $149 for Ultimate Package Purchasers).

We have come to the decision that the designs we had for Filament Storage Solutions were not of an acceptable high quality, and did not function to the quality level that we require to ship as a consumer product. We have come up with a much better, much cheaper solution to allow you to store filament using Palette’s Purple Box, as well as 3D printed clips, plus a holding bar.

We have also come to the decision to simplify and focus on shipping Palettes as soon as possible. It may seem like a trivial task; however, coordinating logistics for hundreds of spools of filament, with different color combinations going to backers is extremely time consuming and the opportunity cost is too high.

We will be releasing an update on the progress of our further improved filament splice tests, as well as names of filament suppliers that work best with Palette.

We wanted to be transparent with everyone as to the reasons behind these decisions. We will be offering a full refund for any backer who has purchased these items.

In terms of the next batch – we have 28 units ready to go out the door in the next week or so. 

We have been sending out PayPal invoices to collect shipping fees for the next Palettes that will be ready to ship. If you’ve received an invoice this is good news - it means that your Palette will be shipping in the next couple weeks! Once a Palette is ready for shipment, and you are next in line with your invoice paid we will ship it out to you. You will also receive a shipping confirmation email once we get the package on its way to you.

We did not hit our goal for assembly this month. This was due to our assembly team decreasing in size, and an inability to quickly fill these roles with qualified people. We’ve gone out and are bringing on additional team members over the next week to ramp this production up, and will continue scaling the team to allow us to catch up with some of our backlog.

We will be delivering to Palette backers 45-73 in the coming week, and are hoping to get another 80-100 out in October. This decreased number is due to the fact that the new assembly team members have not all started yet, and will require some onboarding. This will push delivery back for the second half of our campaign to November, and partially in December as well.

We apologize for this further delay – setting up and beginning to scale a manufacturing operation is a very difficult thing to do. We’re working as quick as we can, and bringing on the appropriate manpower to get you a great product as soon as possible.

If anyone has questions about this update, delivery or anything else please don’t hesitate to post them up and we will answer them as soon as possible!

-Mosaic.