June Manufacturing Update

Hi everyone,

Just a short update this time around, but wanted to keep you all in the loop.

Manufacturing

We were expecting to receive our final samples at the end of May but they were delayed by 10 days due to some unforeseen blips. However, these have now been finished and are winging their way to us from China!

Excitingly, we are expecting these to be the final samples. We've spent months studying stitching, creasing folds in cardboard, flexing cables and polling our friends and family on the 'matt or glossy? packaging debate.

What happens next?

When we approve these samples (hopefully as soon as we receive them!) we tell the factory to go ahead and make the 'tooling'. The tooling consists of all the things the factory needs to manufacturing the product: the moulds for the plastic casing, the cutting shape for the fabric, jigs for testing the PCBs etc.

We're expecting to place the tooling order within the next week or two. Once we do this, the manufacturing process will be officially underway and we will be within weeks of heading to China!

When the tooling is complete (circa 8 weeks) we make a small batch of products - around 100 units. These units are mostly sent off to be used and abused in the safety testing and certification procedures, but we will likely use some of them for some final user testing. More to follow on this in another update - we will likely need some volunteers!

We expect to begin the mass production run about 4 weeks after the tooling is complete.

We're almost there!

With love,
Joanna and The Little Riot Team
xxx