Fri Aug 24 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 07:41:56 AM
Dear backers,
A small update on what’s going for next week. Coming Tuesday, the first 250 orders are expected to ship. Furthermore, the next 400 orders will be packaged and will go to our fulfillment partner on Thursday. There, they will process the orders and ship them on Thursday and Friday.
On Monday, the production for the next orders also continues. Those orders are expected to be transported to our packaging partner on Thursday. After that, the orders will be transported to our fulfillment partner to made ready for shipping.
Our focus now is on keeping you all updated on how things go with production and shipping. Besides that, we took a camera into the Knops factory to show how the Knops production process goes. Here are some sneak peaks of the upcoming footage.
Have a nice weekend!
Much love,
Team Knops
Fri Aug 17 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 10:50:32 AM
Dear backers!
A new update, and so soon? Yes, starting this week we are going to be posting an update every week.
Firstly, because we received some feedback that people think we are unclear in our communication. Backers want to know how many Knops we have sent out and what we expect to ship. We can very much understand this and want to start putting your minds at ease.
Secondly, we have been very busy optimizing production. This meant having the whole Knops team at the different actors that are involved with our production cycle. These actors are our assembly department and our production facility here in Amsterdam, our packaging department, and our fulfillment department. We cooperate on an intense level with these 3 different companies. We currently have over 12 people working fulltime in our assembly and production line producing knops during daytime and optimizing the assembly line and the machinery at night and during the weekends. We have had many hurdles that we managed to fix and now have a good thing going. Because of this intense workload on our entire staff, we had less time to react to emails, messages on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and comments on Facebook. However, we owe it to you guys that we keep answering all your questions. So, now we have reallocated our resources to ensure that we can react to all your messages (swifter).
In this update, we want to tackle the questions you guys have. The most important being how many Knops we have produced and how many we estimate to produce the coming weeks until we have fulfilled all the Indiegogo pre-orders.
This week, we are sending out the last Kickstarter orders. In total, there were 2948 backers that ordered the following Knops. This means that by the end of this week, we have produced 3356 Knops!
Knops Original Black: 1986
Knops Original White: 729
Knops Knurled Black: 431
Knops Knurled White: 122
Knops Gold Black: 54
Knops Gold White: 34
This is great news, as this means that we’ll start producing and shipping the first Indiegogo orders next week! We have tried to make this happen for quite some time now. We know this is later than you and us both hoped for. We are now on the right track though and your Knops are starting to come your way.
Next week we expect to ship the first 600 Indiegogo orders. We are expecting to scale up the production capacity in the coming weeks. We will update the schedule accordingly.
After producing the Knops they are sent to our packaging party to be packaged and then to our shipping partner to be sent out to you guys. This process usually takes two/three days. This means that the Knops we are producing next week will be shipped the week after. Ok, let’s now have a look at the estimated shipping dates. We have updated the delivery schedule. At this moment we have a delay of 2-4 weeks, depending on when you ordered.
Please remember that within the Netherlands, your Knops will be delivered within one or two days. Alas, in other countries waiting times are longer. In this document, you can find how long the Dutch shipping party expects it will take to get your pair of Knops to your country. We are using ‘Track & Trace, so don’t forget to look in that specific column. It is in Dutch, so we advise you to use Google Translate and check out what the name of your country is in Dutch. We have a weird, strange language here! ;)
We are closing the Backerkit survey to prepare the shipping lists for our shipping partner. The survey only closes for orders that are expected to ship soon (1-2 weeks before expected shipping period, see delivery schedule). If you have an address change, you can contact us at [email protected] and we will change it for you! We hope this extensive update has provided you with the information you wanted. If not, you can always drop us a line via Facebook or on [email protected].
You can expect another update next week, where we’ll evaluate how the preceding week played out. Information on how many Knops we produced and shipped, the hurdles we had to overcome and how these challenges affected our production of the week. Until next week!
Much love,
Team Knops
Tue Aug 7 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Tue, Aug 07, 2018 at 01:51:01 PM
Dear backers,
The last two weeks or so we are seeing a lot of comments and receiving a lot of questions via email or Facebook. Most of them about the delivery schedule.
We will point out in an extended way where we are at this moment when it comes to shipping out all perks. Besides this, we try to answer other questions we saw in the comments and emails.
First of all, we want to take away the concern that some people have about getting their pair(s) of Knops. Although we already shipping and some backers commented that they received their Knops some people still have their concerns. We promise that everyone will receive their Knops!
Below we will point out some factors that are worth mentioning to give more clarity about certain processes.
Seal sticker
Earplugs are hygiene products and therefore we chose to seal every Knops box with a sticker. Unfortunately, the stickers we were using break easily during the process of fulfillment and shipping. This resulted in the fact that some backers received their package with the seal broken. We can assure you every product is brand new. We stopped using these seal stickers until we have good ones that work well with the packaging.
Shipping
We are working with a shipping partner that is located not far away from our production partner. This is ideal for our logistics.
Our shipping partner works with PostNL (a Dutch courier), PostNL ships all orders to different countries. In the country of destination, a local courier takes over the shipment and delivers it, in this case, to you our backers. With international shipping, we see a lot of differences in how smooth the shipping goes. Some packages take more time to arrive because they get pick out by the douane. Others can’t be delivered because the address details aren’t right or people aren’t home. In case of wrong shipping details, the products return to our shipping partner in the Netherlands.
We then contact the concerned backer to ask for the right shipping details and ship the order to this address as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, a few backers received a Knops package without the earplugs. As soon as this was brought to our attention we contacted our packaging partner and one of our colleagues went by to discuss this issue. Since this issue, extra supervision is in place before all orders are transported to our shipping partner.
Besides external factors, we are also working to optimize the internal processes with our shipping partner that are relevant in our case. We provide our shipping partner with shipping list for every shipment that we extract from Backerkit. For example, we faced an issue that if a backer ordered multiple Knops sets in different variations only one variation got shipped because their system gave errors if a customer ID was used twice. And since we use the Backerkit customer-ID numbers, to keep track on which orders are shipped, this is important to us. We solved this issue and are shipping all orders where this was the case as soon as possible.
We want to share this all to give you a better understanding and insight into the challenges we face with shipping.
Update delivery schedule
We expect to finish all outstanding Kickstarter orders by the end of this week. These orders will then be packaged and are expected to ship by the end of next week (August 17).
In the meantime, we will start shipping the Indiegogo orders. Looking at our current delivery schedule (below), the orders till 5 February 2018, we have a little delay.
On 17 August we will share a new update with an updated delivery schedule for the Indiegogo and webshop orders.
We value all input, thank you for the questions and feedback. We are still very grateful to have you as early investors, thanks to you Knops is a reality!
Much love,
Team Knops
Note: The response time to emails is taking longer than normal due to the number of emails we’re receiving. We respond to every email as quickly as possible.
Mon Jul 23 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 01:22:30 PM
Dear backers,
A lot of good things happened since we started shipping by the end of May. In this update, we will bring you up to speed about the last couple of weeks.
Scaling up production
In order to ship all orders as fast as possible, it’s important for us to scale up the production capacity. This is something we are working on every week.
People, People, People
The coming weeks the production capacity is going to grow quickly. This Monday a whole bunch of new people have been added to the assembly process at our production partner. With this, we are able to produce a lot more products every week to ship out! Also, the production team is growing closely together, people are working on Knops with a smile! It is a human process, and it is so nice to see the energy in the team.
Tooling
For all the different stations in the assembly process, we made effective and time-saving tools to make the assembly so smooth as possible. This also helps to make it easier for the people to work on Knops.
Test equipment
Every single Knops product is still going through our test procedure to maintain a high quality of the acoustics of the product. To be able to keep up with the growing numbers of products made, we had to expand our testing capacity. The current test equipment now has doubled throughput to test Knops! Beside this, we are working on a completely new test bench to ensure every single piece of Knops continues to be rigorously tested.
Packaging
More products produced means more products to be packed. We are working closely with our packaging partner to help assist with to growing numbers of products that need to be packed. Making sure that they are able to work as efficiently as possible and to add more personnel if needed.
Fancy versions
We have different variations of Knops. Besides the Original version with the smooth Stainless steel rings, we also have the Knurling and Gold versions.
These Knurled and Gold versions are much more elaborate to build. The gold versions are treated at a specialist all the way in Germany to make sure the quality is optimal. We received our first batch of the gold rings last week. The Knurled version has a much more time-consuming process compared to the smooth ring and is batched separately. We optimized the knurling pattern to best fit the design and function. This week our supplier will provide us with a large batch of new Knurled rings. So we will start to send out Knurled and Gold versions this week.
Delivery schedule
As mentioned last time, we have a dynamic schedule that we will update for you as we go. We have the production running well now to catch up with the delivery of all the Kickstarter backers. Below is the schedule. Please note that the open Gold and Knurled Knops orders of the first weeks will be shipped expedited now.
Knops review by New Atlas
We are thankful for the extended review that Loz Blain made about Knops! You can read the review here.
We will keep you posted about any development regarding production and the delivery schedule.
Much love,
Team Knops
Thu Jul 5 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Thu, Jul 05, 2018 at 11:25:15 PM
Dear backers,
We like to give you an update about how production is going in relation to the delivery schedule. A few of you backers mentioned that they were in the understanding that they should have received their order based on their backer number. This was right, in the last two weeks we faced some hiccups in the production process which resulted in a delay when it comes to shipping. That being said, we solved these issues.
With the shipment that goes out this week and early next week, we will be on schedule again, even a little ahead of schedule.
We already received a lot of positive feedback on the product from people that used Knops. We will share some of these experiences any time soon.
We will keep you posted about any development regarding production and the delivery schedule.
Much love,
Team Knops
