Direct from China: a production report on Sling Back from Nikki and Jordan!

Now that we are ending Q1, I figured it would be a good time to give you a Quirky Operations update. We’ve got a lot of exciting things accomplished in the past few months and will continue to progress in the coming months. I have included the latest below:

1. We have successfully set up our USA warehouse in Pennsylvania. EchoData has been a great partner and we are happy to be able to ship orders same day. We will continue to do our best in this regard as long as the order comes in before 2:00pm EST and that the item is in stock.

2. We set up our Hong Kong warehouse and consolidation center. All of our international distribution partners will pick up their Quirky product orders in Hong Kong. This is an exciting progression for Quirky because it is helping to set ourselves up for an optimal global presence!

3. We are working on getting freight costs down…we realize this has been a community concern and are working as fast as we can to make this better for you all. We will pass along any news on prices when we have them.

4. Invoicing and Payments is working properly! Time for all your hard-earned Quirky work to pay off in CASH!

5. We are working to hit out 2010 goal of a product shipping within 75 days of it hitting threshold. I do think we will get there VERY SOON.

6. We promise an effective and effiecient delivery of Cordies and Scratch-n-Scroll very shortly! If  you haven’t confirmed your orders, please do so now!

That is all I’ve got for you at the moment. As always, if you have any questions about this feel free to let us know. Here’s to an even more successful and lucrative Q2 for the Quirky Team and all Community Members.

P.S. Did you know they sell both Corn and Taro Pie at McDonalds in China?!

No, this is not subliminal Princeton University Ad, published by Jess or Nikki…. this is the limiting factor to product shipments in the next 3 weeks.

Today marked the start of the chinese new year.  With that, Quirky and all of our Chinese Partners wanted to say “Gong Xi Fa Cai”, which translates roughly into… “May prosperity be with you”

As you know, we’re waiting on Scratch & Scroll,  Beamer & Cordies (and recently bobble brush) to be finished up at our factories.  All 3 are VERY close, and we hope to get them all out in March, as soon as our factory returns back to work.

Chinese new year has historically been a loss of time for consumer product brands and all companies that work out there.   This is like their December.   Lots of workers heading home to visit their families, etc.

We are lucky to have great manufacturing partnerships in place, and I am excited about the pace and quality we have been able to keep up.   Rest assured, as soon as our partners return from holiday, we’ll have the next few products shipping within a few weeks.

Next week I am going to chronicle some of the challenges we’ve had to overcome with the production of things like scratch & scroll, and beamer.   These have been challenging engineering projects, but we are happy to report the wait is almost over.

….If only Tony the Tiger wasn’t holding up production for a few weeks

GONG Xi Fa CAI everyone!