It has been a crazy two years! We launched a Kickstarter campaign in January of 2021 to raise the funds to purchase materials and build inventory for our latest design, the Solo V2 (which we now call Solo 2). The turnout was tremendous...with over 6000 backers on the kickstarter platform...and reaching 3000 backers on IndieGogo. An exciting spring and summer gave way to a very problematic fall of 2021.
Our design had manufacturing flaws that resulted in a near 50% failure rate of product. We had to reconfigure out modular design and make capital investments into new machinery that is expected to decrease our failure rate to less than 0.5% (99.5% success rate!). Delays in design changes, delivery of machinery, and then ensuing poor quality control due to certain suppliers created a storm of delayed delivery of inventory. We were significantly impacted by Covid due to supplier closures, shipping stoppages and shortages of inventory due to the great chip shortage of 2022. And there were some areas of performance that we as a team could have improved on as well.
Throughout all of this, we have managed to keep a steady stream of inventory to our fulfillment teams. As of today, we have delivered over 10000 devices to kickstarter backers, and currently have less than 1000 shipments of the Indiegogo campaign left to fulfill. We expect to be campaign complete by early August as our new build is finally expected to be in action early July 2023.
Finally!! With a successful build in July, we will be looking to turn on preorders for our new build in July as well, anticipating deliveries by the end of August for our first batch on the new build. Priority of inventory goes to fulfilling the remainder of our Indiegogo cohort.
Two years of unanticipated delay resulted in drastic measures of austerity for the team...i.e. we had to have jobs to work on other projects while majority of funds went to suppliers, manufacturer and fulfillment teams. But...we are done simmering and ready to bring Solo 2 to full release at the end of this summer.
We will have a more focused update on firmware in the next few weeks.
We are offering a teaser of a prerelease to our blog followers. Currently, we have about a hundred each of our limited edition devices leftover from Kickstarter. If you feel like you missed out...have a look at our updated homepage! They are listed and will be available until sold out!