Thu 24 Jun 2010

Cloak: Our Progress

by ben kaufman

We’ve continued to work at a good pace over the past few weeks on Cloak, and it’s all starting to come together.

1.  All hard plastic parts have been production approved. This includes the typing stand, the portrait stand, the barrel, the barrel cover, and the hinge pieces.

2.  Metal production is complete on the metal shaft.

3.  The silicone iPad housing is now complete, and production approved (pending a minor adjustment due to be complete tonight).

As for the top cover (a main culprit in our extended process), a few things have needed to happened since we last wrote:

- We modified the tooling for the inner hard plastic part to accommodate a compression secondary process vs. an injection-based secondary process. This change took 10 or so days.

- Once we received the final hard plastic parts from the factory (this happened early last week), we shuttled samples out to two different vendors who will be working on shooting the silicone over the hard plastic.

Whoever finishes the part to our quality standards first will begin production immediately. Both of these vendors are due to show us final parts before Monday.

We are optimistic, given our prior work with these two vendors in the past, that we are just days away from being into formal production with the Cloak.

We will, of course, continue to answer your questions and provide updates on the product.

As for the launch plan…

Final purchase orders will be placed with our factories tomorrow, Friday, before noon EST. Assuming the top cover works as planned, formal production will begin in the middle or end of next week, which means first goods will arrive at the end of the following week.

You can expect our confirmation email the minute we receive word that formal production has begun.

We will be flying in Cloaks on a daily basis according to how many are completed by the factory on a given day. Orders will then ship on a first confirmed, first shipped basis — meaning you’ll want to get back to the site and pick your color/get your card charged as fast as possible once we send out the SKU select, because supply will be limited to a few hundred a day in the first week or so. Black and pink will ship first; blue and green will follow.

Another note, which will not affect most of you (except in a positively): we will most likely be raising the retail price once the product ships … the marketplace is showing that iPad cases are selling well at a higher price, prospective retailers have asked for a higher MSRP, and we decided to spare no expense when it came to material decisions related to this product.

Whatever price you pre-ordered the Cloak at will be honored.

The-Best-Damn-Case-On-The-Market

I know everyone is anxious to get the Cloak. Believe me, I am too.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been around the Apple Accessory Design world for close to six years now, and I’ve seen it all. Never before have I seen a case as fully featured, in as tight of a package, constructed using such an amazing combination of materials and manufacturing methods.

It’ll be worth the wait. As with any Quirky product, your card is not charged until you come back to the site to confirm your order (so be on the lookout for our confirmation email). Further, if you are not completely satisfied with the Cloak, we’ll replace or refund your product without any questions asked.

We’re sitting here anxious to get this baby into the marketplace, and even more anxious to reward the influencers of this product with close to $40,000 in the coming weeks.

Thanks for your patience.