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2011-02-04 05:33:12 (12984 views) All our stuff is scheduled to arrive at the warehouses shortly after Chinese New Year, or within a couple of weeks from now.
Due to rolling reserve requirements, which would interrupt our supply for 3 months or more, we will not accept credit card payments for our pilot run. Payments will have to be made via an international bank transfer. Some may be unfamiliar with this so just in case you haven't done it before, you just head out to your bank, ask for a "foreign remittance form" and they help you fill it out with information we will provide.
Update: to protect your privacy, both on the remittance form and and in the future on the card statement, we will not be using "DreamLover Laboratories" name in full. So the bank staff and whoever gets a hold of your credit card statement will not know what you're purchasing. On the reason for payment you can write "electronic product".
If you wish to use internet banking to do this, there may be a process to go through before international remittances are allowed from your online panel. Depending on the bank you may need to receive a snail mail letter with a code, other times you just show up at your local branch and request the service to be enabled. This activation could take a few days.
MISC UPDATE
The packaging guys used more than 25% heavier materials for production, this makes the packaging look and feel sturdier and more durable, however the weight was massive when trying to ship, which would have been a problem if there wasn't such thing as weight by volume. In this case the volume is so big it takes over and weight no longer matters. This is probably why most product pouches (such as the one the CB6000 itself is shipped in) are made of thin, light fabric which can be flattened. We didn't consider this volume issue at all - our packaging is similar to what's sometimes used for razors or semi-hard eyeglass cases.
There was some panic as usual due to the unforeseen costs, and we had our local guy make tens of phone calls to freight forwarders, eventually we settled for a method where the merchandise is sent partially by air and partially by sea (don't ask...)
Our shipping cost for the bags ended up being identical to production cost. With air freight, shipping would have cost more than twice as much as the packaging itself.
By going through this mini adventure and having local guys make tens of phone calls we managed to figure out the whole spectrum of shipping options from China, the price breakdowns, possible discounts, weight and volume rules - this is going to be essential knowledge moving forward.
Our product has tens of components so it's not being easy nor cheap to coordinate shipments, some parts come from Japan, some from Canada, some from the UK, some from China. There were a few returned bank transfers and misc trouble along the way, but all's fine now.
We are using this waiting time productively by creating even more boards by hand. We've gotten so good at hand soldering these boards when we reworked our very problematic first assembly batch that now hand soldering them from scratch seems like child's play (though it's still massively time consuming due to the sheer number of components).
We're also gathering course materials from the web and corresponding with a couple of associates regarding our bootstrapping strategy which is really the biggest thing on the radar presently... how big is the chastity market? how many people interested in chastity will also want a male training system? how many units can we set as a target for our next production batch? how many people will purchase at what price? at what point can we automate production instead of running after suppliers 16 hours a day in 3 time zones trying to coordinate everything? do we want/need distributors? do we need to immediately change tooling to make production easier or save money to buy components? and there are a whole range of top secret strategic issues that we need to figure out before launch.
But everything's looking up and as soon as the product's on the shelves we won't want to nor be able to brainstorm for long, so do look forward to an imminent release which will be accompanied by detailed ordering information and instructions.
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However I for one would not feel like going to my bank and telling some clerk that I was buying a device from your company.
Have you considered PayPal? Yes there is a fee but I for one would be happier to add the fee to the price than reveal my character to my bank.