Say goodbye to smudgy eyeglasses. Say goodbye to germs on your phone. UnSmudge comes with cleaning liquid and microfiber pads. Sleek.
Guys, hope this email finds you well. Some testing times on our side but we are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.
Shipment from China has arrived. Posting some pics here. We are doing the packing here and will start shipping soon.
Thanks,
Victor
Hi All - just an update:
After a few back-and-forths on cosmetic details we finished production, Quality control, and assembly. Pledge-wise packing is done. Please check out the pics. 'Branding' on the package is creating some un-needed annoyance so I called it off. We are going with normal package.
Thirteen months now. And I have not delivered the product yet.
Before the creation of this project (and after), I backed a few projects here on Kickstarter. I did receive all the products. Some in time and some a bit late. Nevertheless, I received them all.
But my product has not been delivered yet. Clearly, there are some places where I have gone wrong. And I did not do something right. Along with the product, I owe an answer to all the backers. I started with the idea of solving a problem with a particular design. Eyeglasses. Smudges are a problem. We need microfiber and cleaning liquid together. Also make it so that it cleans phones and tablets. Pretty straightforward idea.
As of now, I have all the parts produced. But I am not delivering them yet. Why? There are just 8 moving parts. A good design should do the job. Just manufacture them, assemble and deliver. There are many other products that are exponentially complex and harder to produce are being manufactured and delivered every day. We learnt a hard lesson that just designing doesn't automatically convert and guarantee the same 'ease' into sourcing and manufacturing. Kudos to every other team delivering the product on time.
I made a mistake of moving the production out to a place where my team can not easily travel and run the testing iterations. What should have been a week’s turnaround took a month in earlier stages. COVID or not, that is a clear deviation from the earlier plan. The communication between sample makers and the production team took a little time to get in sync with each other. As the time went by, we saw the frustration from the backers. Every frustrated comment over there by backers is justified.
Even with all the hurdles, we finally got all the parts ready. Only that the cap that goes on top of a spray seems to fit ‘okay’ and not ‘perfect’. We debated whether to just go deliver the product 'as is' and put off the fires in the comments section. I have some IT background. Software products are delivered even when they are not ‘ready’. You go fix them later with a patch as the users report bugs. This process is not frowned upon in the software industry. But how can I do that with a physical product? Especially to the ones that actually trusted and funded the idea? So we decided against it. We would rather refund the pledge over delivering an okay product.
We have not forgotten you. In fact you helped the project take off. The last few weeks we have been really trying hard on us as we are focussed to complete the project. Not to mention the mental toll that comes with it. Please allow a few more weeks so that we rectify the cap situation and deliver you the best product.
Happy Fathers’ day!
Guys, we are getting closer to delivery. As mentioned in the last update, we ran into an issue with microfiber and the shell parts and they not fitting together due to variance in the thickness. So we decided to re-produce the product. This step is complete now. The quality control is done and we do not have any issues with the said part now. We did get the eyeglass cleaning liquid. We are finishing off the mandatory paperwork for exports. Next step is packing. And we are planning to air ship the product following packing.
I'll keep you posted on this very soon.
Thanks,
Victor
First of all - My apologies for the lack of updates here in the last 2 months. It certainly was not the brightest of my decisions.
So in the 3rd week of December, we were done with production and I sent an update about it. I spoke about shipping out the product without taking quality control into consideration. The following week we found a particular problem with outer protective shell and the microfiber cloth thickness. We microfiber cloth ordered in 2 batches. And there was a slight thickness difference of the fabric between those two batches. This became apparent during the assembly and quality control. We worked on it in a couple of ways that were unsuccessful in the following weeks. And then we resorted to reproduce the part for the right thickness of microfiber cloth.
By this time, in China, the manufacturing company was preparing to wind down operations for Chinese New Year holiday February06-26th. The management team returned to work Feb 21st. We worked on the material supply and the production ETA this week. I am attaching a couple of pictures here.
I understand the frustration for the delay in the project. If I were in your shoes, I would feel the same. We will fix this issue as fast as we can and get ready for the next steps.
Thanks,
Victor