New overlays

These look lovely - from earlier posts, there seemed to be a preference for a matt finish though?

Bands found.
CE stamp obtained.
Overlays sorted.

So what's left on your To Do list?
- Boxes and foam?
- Accepting credit card payments?
- Placing orders for all the parts?
- Assembly?
- Shopping cart website?
- customs issues?
- anything else?
- leave China?

Are you planning on taking pre-orders to fund buying the parts and assembly run?

Boxes and foam - battling with vendors trying not to get ripped off, found a very cool solution now and if it works out it will be a welcome surprise

Card payments - very complex, has to do with everything, company location, business type, even the website (our theory section DEFINITELY doesn't help as all the close by processors turned us down). We have to do crazy things or pay usury fees to get accepted from the beginning which we don't want to do. Even paypal and 2checkout won't take us. So for the first batch we'll accept wire transfers only. Plus this is not the time to have a 30-50% rolling reserve we need cashflow. When we have a transaction history we'll reapply hoping they will be less fussy. By that time we'll likely have to switch to a more corporate website and move all the male training stuff and courses elsewhere...

Parts - already ordered and on their way half is at customs right now half on the fedex airplane.

Assembly - guys standing by for parts to arrive

Cart website - easy software stuff we only have one product so :)

Customs - we've got an importer now it won't be a problem hopefully

Leave China - SOON! Really looking forward to it! It will be a big celebration :)

I hope orders are shipped before leaving china...

;)

Awesome. It sounds like it could be rolling off the production line in a matter of weeks... Possibly even in time for Xmas??? What kinda evil Santa would bring a poor guy something like that, hehehe!

Looking forward to finaly being able to purchase it :)

The second picture you show has a plastic cover sheet. Will printable blanks of those be available for those who wish to customize the button overlay (either for masking its purpose or for when using with as a pc interface control)?

I would assume the peel off cover is thin and not very sticky, used only for protecting the finish during packing and shipping.

Hello.

As an accountant I find your abilities very interesting. Product design, production set up excellent. Accounting skills however very bad, you must by now be able to price. Or at the very least have price ranges, say it will cost between xxx and zzz? Or is this a demonstration of marketing skills in trying to copy the apple marketing style of secrecy?

I am male and will buy this as a gift for my partner. While I want to know the price the nature of the product makes me price insensitive , so why the lack of information.

Please let us have some indication of price.

Thanks in advance.

No pricing, no shipping to Australia... it's all becoming depressing :(

To all our potential customers in countries outside of the US and EU... we're VERY appreciative of your enthusiasm and for being a potential client. If you've been following the blog however it should not come as a surprise that the tests we've been doing allow us to sell in the US and the EU only. We've been repeating this many times.

For shipping to countries for which we do not have safety and electromagnetic compatibility test results, we will confirm again with some people if the client could possibly assume all responsibility for the shipment.

However this act would be against local laws and products could be seized at customs and fines imposed, so we wouldn't recommend trying this. If this weren't the case, the rules would be utterly meaningless and we could just be based in Nepal and ship all over the world without worrying about any testing, right? Depending on the country up to 20% of incoming products are inspected.

Sorry but we're small and we're already biting way, way more than we can chew. We can't do whole-world compliance certifications before we even start selling our first batch. The risk and costs and the time required to find out what needs to be done are too great at this point in time.

Australia has the C-tick, China has the CCC mark, Japan has TELEC, and this is just for EMC, general product safety is another layer of complexity that differs from place to place and requires a lot of reading before we can assess what needs to be done as rules are slightly different for every product class, and there are exceptions to be researched and so forth.

We went through this disturbing awakening early on and it was deeply traumatic to see how many rules are imposed and we totally understand your frustration and deeply wish we could sell everywhere!

If you're in one of those countries we cannot sell to yet, our apologies and our promise that when we have some cashflow, possibly right after our first batch of shipments, we will research more and do those tests and become able to sell there, too. With some luck English speaking countries will only require rewriting the report and not doing even more testing. With extreme luck there might be exemptions (Australia C-tick has some exemptions for battery powered devices, though it is not clear whether RF transmission invalidates it just like it invalidates the lower voltage limit on Europe's low voltage directive).

For now you can have the product delivered to a US/EU address and if you can find your own way to have the product delivered to you then you've got just what you wanted i.e. you're taking full responsibility for the shipment and we couldn't possible get implicated or fined. But we're not recommending this and it is the last time you will hear this tip as we're not instructing you to break local regulations, so you can refer to countless forums out there that deal with people wanting to get the PAL or NTSC version of such and such camcorder and shopping sites like Amazon not shipping to a particular country... they have basically the same "routing" problem.

We'll research more, time permitting, and keep you updated on our findings.