February 01, 2024
EEW 6.1 Update
The EEW 6.1 assembly ran into an unexpected slowdown since the sliding hook oring manufacturer sent too few orings and we had to wait for more of those to be made and delivered. It shows how even a single low cost part can delay production. The good news is the EEW 6.1s in line and the container should be loaded on a ship on February 11th. The container will take around three months to get to Boston. I plan to start shipping them in May, but this still depends on no major shipping delays. I will keep everyone here updated on when they are ready to ship to you.
(I generated this image using AI – sheep watching container ship at sunset)
Busy Shipping
In the newsletter last month, I announced the EEW Lazy Kate and EEW Cone Winder are in stock. The response was crazy. First my website crashed. I use a scalable web server on Amazon’s cloud so I increased my web server resource allocation and fixed that. Next, I received over 600 orders in the first few days, which is way more than I was expecting. I found one retired friend who was willing to help so we worked over the weekend and got all the orders out in just two days. It wasn’t how I expected to spend my weekend, but I wanted to get them shipped quickly so people wouldn’t be waiting any longer than needed. A huge shout out to all of you supporters! The main reason I’m able to keep my prices affordable is because so many of you love these fiber tools. My two goals with this business are to grow the worldwide fiber community and to make a reasonable living for my family. I’m accomplishing both of those. Thanks!
Return Policy Review
I’ve had the same return policy in place for the past 6 years. Back when I set it up I was having issues with a few users getting the same product multiple times and returning it. While I don’t have any direct evidence of why this was happening, it did seem to happen around major fiber festivals so I wondered whether people were getting my wheels for those and then returning them. I never sell returned items as new and don’t have time to refurbish them myself so I sell them for a fraction of their new value to a friend who refurbishes them and sells them as used. Returns raise the prices for everyone else so I wanted to stop it. While I considered a lot of options, the main ones I considered was adding a restocking fee or limiting the number of returns to one. I decided there were legitimate reasons for a single return and as a customer I’d like to be able to do a single return without having to pay a restocking fee. I do require returns to pay the return shipping mainly because it simplifies the return process for me since I don’t have to send them return labels which take time for me to make and sometimes people don’t have access to printers.
That is the current state of things. I am committed to cleaning up the wording on my return page to make it more concise. However, before I do that I wanted to see if the community had any thoughts so I’ve created a poll to get your feedback on what you think would be the best return policies to use in my store. If you’re interested, please go fill out my survey here. I’m fine making my return policy more generous, but I wanted to see what others thought since that would cause prices to increase (only a small amount since my return levels are much lower than big online retailers like Amazon see).
Product Updates
Below are estimates and the dates may change.
- EEW 6.1 – May 2024
I don’t accept pre-orders in my store, but when I get a batch of products there should be enough for everyone who wants them.
– Maurice Ribble
(Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)
www.dreamingrobots.com
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