I sent him an email and just got a message saying they would be shipped in 3 weeks. He could have apologised or explained if he had wanted to. On my order confirmation it said 3-4 weeks originally. I chose a wood finish, maybe that is the reason, he didn’t say.
@Frank Dernie, I sense a fellow traveller from the British Isles! Delighted to connect. Note below.
I may be overly sensitive to criticism of Garuspik because I think what he has accomplished is a remarkable..perhaps unique, feat.
@GGroch, you make a great point.
As you may have noticed I use my real name for transparency. I work in the technology industry, specifically around open source, and my area of focus is in building cooperation between diverse groups of companies around the supply chain. I am here because
@Garuspik is doing something very interesting and it catches my personal interest of engineering and production.
Making a device of any sort is difficult. Making a production run of a device, with the attendant quality control requirements, is an order of magnitude more difficult. It is interesting to see
@GGroch note "My pair, and it seems most pairs, were flawless. This surprised me, I expected less from a 1st time manufacturer with a hand built product. He appears to have chosen quality over speed."
Reading through
@Garuspik's various posts, he spent two years preparing the concept, and used the Kickstarter to build out an order book of around 500+ headphones. At one point he noted that the first 250 devices had occasional quality control issues, but the second 250 had no similar reports, and he was proud of that.
So we are dealing with an individual who is dedicated to making things to fit a vision of mass production. He has two employees and is fine-tuning processes on the fly. If there are flaws he immediately asks for people to return the defective device for analysis and repair. It is very promising, and there are many notes that align positively around his deployment, with the sole exception being shipping.
He is clearly having some difficulty in scaling. Personally, I am glad he is prioritizing quality of quantity, but I concur with
@Frank Dernie that this is not always acceptable. Delays of 11 weeks are a bit much for a production product. Not unheard of though! Just look at the Galaxy Fold...and
@Garuspik is one person plus two starting from scratch.
Yet...I really, really hope my headphones arrive in the 6 week window they were promised. If not, I will be noting this, and their eventual delivery time, and their eventual quality in terms of build and sonics. I believe these experiences provide snapshots that will help inform future potential users. But we are all really early adopters. In my experience these hiccups are not uncommon.