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TrevC
1
Sep 25, 2013
We're coming up on 1 month now and most orders still haven't reached the Massdrop fulfilment center. I'm really not impressed with the turnaround time by Bottlehead. I realize they're a small business, but they knew this was coming and should've been adequately prepared for the orders they'd be obligated to fulfil. I think they need to get their act together if they're going to use Massdrop for any future orders.
JDWarner
349
Sep 25, 2013
TrevC@TrevC Just to build upon @mvrk10256's point - Bottlehead is not a monolothic, vertically integrated vendor. They source parts from third party suppliers, probably including Mouser/DigiKey and perhaps more esoteric sources for certain parts. I think certain components (like transformers) are custom manufactured to Bottlehead's specs.<br /><br />Smaller vendors like this do not keep enough parts on hand to immediately ship 80 orders of their entire catalog. It doesn't make fiscal sense. And "they knew this was coming" doesn't really fly. The previous Bottlehead Crack drop had exactly two takers. Even after it became clear there was strong interest, it's not reasonable to expect them to be able to immediately spin up production by 400-600%. Even if they had the labor, the parts didn't exist.<br /><br />If a critical part just went out of stock at a third party vendor, a month is not unreasonable to have to wait for it to be re-stocked. Or if a load of timely-shipped parts were in a shipping container that got swept overboard coming across the Pacific, so the clock gets reset. Or the UPS guys played soccer with that box of tubes, and only half arrived unbroken. Even if everything goes well, there are a lot of logistics to take care of on their end.<br /><br />Realize they are probably sitting on a lot of mostly-finished kits, limited by waiting for the final key parts to arrive, and probably aren't any more enthused about the situation than you are.
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