(UPDATE, 20 JULY 2021)
Dear Bucqle Community,
Finally, some good news to share with you from sunny Amsterdam today!
The drafted adjustments, we have been talking about in our previous update, have now been prototyped successfully. The locking bar is closing and truly locking for your perfect fit.
What does this mean for our process? The positive feedback has brought us to finetuning this concept by entering the testing phase. The product will be heavily tested as if it is being used for several years. This way we can deliver the quality and sustainability we have promised you all the way, and for which we have not compromised anything. After the successful completion of this phase, we start adjusting the molds which will take about two weeks, followed by mold testing, and, if all works as expected, this will eventually lead to the start of MASS PRODUCTION.
We are still aiming for a September shipment, but as we have learned from our mistakes, we will not make any hard promises to you as we are not there yet, although getting pretty close. Let's get through these crucial next few weeks. We will be able to firm up the delivery schedule when the mass production phase finally, finally, finally has been reached.
All we know right now is that this is a very positive and major step towards the final product specification and production readiness.
Sorry for the longest wait ever, when we have more facts on progress in these final weeks available for sharing, we will update you again.
Thank you for your time and stay tuned, there is a clear sparkling Bucqle-light at the horizon.
Team Bucqle
(UPDATE, 26 JUNE 2021)
Dear all,
We hope you are doing well these days, as the world is slowly opening again after a horrible
previous year.
From different directions, we hear people are not always receiving our emails, answers, or
updates. Most of them either unsubscribed for our email communication or have our emails
end up in spam, rest assured we do answer all your emails as soon as they pop up in our
inbox. Nevertheless, we are very sorry for any miscommunication and take full responsibility
for any of these negative experiences.
Where are we at right now? We have been talking for a long time about adjusting the
design to make it work in mass production. None of this has been a lie, as a few badmouthing people suggest, and we have been very busy working on this. And yes, it is a slow
and cumbersome process, we are the first to acknowledge this. Please understand that we
would love to leave this year behind us and to start building further upon our product rather
than holding back on new opportunities.
A handmade prototype can be very different from a mass production product, as we
learned the hard way. When running our CrowdFunding campaigns, we presented our
handmade, perfectly working product, but we did not realize there were still some
important steps to take towards mass production, we can now blame this on our
inexperience and have learned a great deal. If we had been able to travel to our
manufacturers in China, we would probably have solved this sooner, but from a distance,
without physical presence, processes go extremely slow, and all are depending on external
parties, which do not always have Bucqle on top of their to-do list, also struggling though
the pandemic.
The changes we promised to make, we finally have made. We redesigned the locking
function, now being able to lock your fit with a pin-hole construction, locked by a brace of
spring steel that pushes the locking bar into closing position, making it close when releasing
it with your finger. It might be hard to imagine, but we have finally some designs to share
with you – we must be cautious with sharing this as we have seen what Chinese copycats
have done to our marketing materials and product still in development.
Update design Bucqle
What does this mean for our next steps, like the delivery date?
The next step is prototyping, this is what we started earlier this week and will roughly take
about two more weeks. The prototype will be tested, and we continue to adjust the molds
and expect the start of mass production within a month. If the prototype happens to show
points of improvement, this will have to be redesigned, reproduced, and tested again. This
is a cycle that we have been in over the past half a year, as mentioned before we go for
quality not for speed.
Nevertheless, we have good faith in this new design since it is a very practical solution with
less chance for errors and therefore a sustainable option for the future. The entire process
(production, packing, shipping) may take until the end of summer, September most likely,
for your Bucqle to arrive on your doorstep.
From now on, we will also make use of our own website to post the latest updates, so 100%
actual information is accessible to all of you. In case the information flow is not going as fast
as you want it to be, this is because we strive to collect enough information for a solid
update, instead of forcing one that we have to adjust once more in the future.
We hope to have cleared up the situation we are in. Thank you for reading and we, more
than anyone else, want to get this dealt with as soon as possible. So, we can finally start
doing business and make people happy again.
Thanks for your continued support
Team Bucqle
