Nathan the Machinist
KnifeMaker / Machinist / Evil Genius
Moderator
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2007
- Messages
- 15,579
I'm trying to decide if we should open a pre-order for the DEK1. There has been a fair amount of interest in it and we're running low on stock. I could simply order more materials and start another run but this approach requires I pursue conservative standard offerings and quantities. Or I could also add on a pre-order to the next run which gives me some wiggle room to safely build some customizations into the production process and also better tune the size of the run.
We've been doing these pre-orders in the past in order to address frustrated buyers and having pretty good luck with the process. I didn't particularly want to do pre-orders because I wasn't having a problem simply building and selling our regular offerings without them and a pre-order does add some additional complexity to the process for Jo to keep up with. But, in retrospect, it not only allows folks who don't enjoy the Friday sales format to get what they want, it also gives me breathing room in the manufacturing process to build customizations that wouldn't be practical to incorporate blindly into a regular generic run.
So, with past runs moving smoothly, I've been in a groove where we have one pre-order ramping up while another winds down. Generally a large knife and a small knife. At the moment we have no open knife pre-orders and a K18 sword pre-order clogging up the works. Looking out a few months I can see the K18 starting to come off the machines in a few weeks on the auto grinder and a few more weeks on the big green Mori and a few more weeks after that on the NV5000 Mori. As we get closer to machines opening up I need to have materials on order and we need to crystallize our upcoming production schedule and this would normally include the next pre-order. <--- normally
But maybe not this time? I'd always said that pre-orders are fundamentally a bad idea for knife makers and knife buyers in general and I'd stop doing them if we were running into hiccups with them and that has finally happened on this K18 project. We're substantially late on it. They will ship, but at least 6 months late. So, with that blemish on our track record now should we continue with pre-orders? If I'm going to, it's time to start one, but I wanted to gauge folks opinion on it with a satisfaction poll.
In general, how satisfied are you with our pre-orders?
Please vote and share your thoughts below.
We've been doing these pre-orders in the past in order to address frustrated buyers and having pretty good luck with the process. I didn't particularly want to do pre-orders because I wasn't having a problem simply building and selling our regular offerings without them and a pre-order does add some additional complexity to the process for Jo to keep up with. But, in retrospect, it not only allows folks who don't enjoy the Friday sales format to get what they want, it also gives me breathing room in the manufacturing process to build customizations that wouldn't be practical to incorporate blindly into a regular generic run.
So, with past runs moving smoothly, I've been in a groove where we have one pre-order ramping up while another winds down. Generally a large knife and a small knife. At the moment we have no open knife pre-orders and a K18 sword pre-order clogging up the works. Looking out a few months I can see the K18 starting to come off the machines in a few weeks on the auto grinder and a few more weeks on the big green Mori and a few more weeks after that on the NV5000 Mori. As we get closer to machines opening up I need to have materials on order and we need to crystallize our upcoming production schedule and this would normally include the next pre-order. <--- normally
But maybe not this time? I'd always said that pre-orders are fundamentally a bad idea for knife makers and knife buyers in general and I'd stop doing them if we were running into hiccups with them and that has finally happened on this K18 project. We're substantially late on it. They will ship, but at least 6 months late. So, with that blemish on our track record now should we continue with pre-orders? If I'm going to, it's time to start one, but I wanted to gauge folks opinion on it with a satisfaction poll.
In general, how satisfied are you with our pre-orders?
Please vote and share your thoughts below.
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