Shipping updates and timelines!

It's been a crazy week and we are still packing!  We are now pretty efficient at working through the packages, but it's still a slow process since we are checking every glass.  The QA at the factory is actually pretty amazing since we haven't really found any that would be considered "defective". There is one glass we took out that had a tiny "hair" of glass stuck to the inside of it, which was barely noticeable.  This is out of many hundreds of glasses we examined, so I'm very, very happy with the quality and factory QA thus far.  It's pretty amazing for a handmade product. This gives me a lot of confidence going into our future with Amazon fulfillment.

Several of you have started getting glasses and the results are unanimous.  The glass looks much better in person than it does in pictures.  This proves that I am no photographer :)  I'm blown away by the positive feedback so far, though.  I can't tell you how happy it makes me feel to know people appreciate the glass as a piece of art.

For those of you who have gotten your glasses, here is the one minute video explaining the Esington method.  I will make a more detailed tutorial on esington.com in the coming weeks, but this is a good starting point:

So far we've had 0 complaints about broken glasses!  We are doing our best to wrap them up safely.  Here is one of the box tests (with a medium steel glass inside) I recently performed with the help of my son:

There was some confusion at the factory about the first order, so the distribution of products didn't match my original order.  If you are a very early backer (below #200) and still haven't gotten a shipment email, it is probably a fulfillment issue.  Feel free to email me or message me to get more information. I guarantee your product will be on the way as soon as humanly possible.  

I came into this knowing it would be a learning experience, so I thought I'd share with you some of what I've learned so far :

• When figuring out the shipping flow, extremely small batches is best (doing one order at a time from QA to labeling).  I made the mistake of creating a bunch of boxes ahead of time, some of which aren't going to be used due to the factory mismatch.
• Spending extra on packing is worth the cost and effort.  This was a tip from Kate Matsudaira and it definitely held true.  Not having to deal with broken glasses and returns (so far!) is a huge relief
• A lot of companies in the shipping space have bugs or impediments that don't allow customers to pay efficiently or at all (especially USPS.com, which was unusable for me for that reason).  There wasn't a single company that didn't require me to place a phone call to pay them.  A few clever folks that can figure out how to take money from people efficiently could probably make some inroads here :)

Here is the timeline for the 2nd and 3rd shipments:

• Those of you in the international test program will be receiving tracking information as soon as your package goes out.  This has already started!  I expect this to run for at least 3 weeks, so don't panic if you don't immediately get tracking info.  Please let me know if there is any issue so we can adapt.  
• The 2nd factory order should be completed sometime in the next 5-7 days.  This shipment is headed straight to Amazon (probably 10 days of travel time + customs) and will be distributed by them at that point, which should be another few days for processing. Once they've processed the orders, they should get distributed much more quickly than I could possibly achieve here at my house :) International customers will be fulfilled based on the test program above.  If all goes well, the international fulfillment centers will help you get your order faster.
• Unfortunately, I had to shut down the parallel order running at the second factory.  The product was not holding to the same standards as the original factory.  This will mean a bit of a delay on the final shipments, but I promise you the quality will be worth it.  The 3rd order will start as soon as the 2nd finishes in 3-5 days and should run for 10-12 days.

I would love to hear more from those of you who have the glass and are you using it!  I will put some of your stories up on esington.com (with your permission, of course).