Its a fair point. As Easy mentioned, we are a small operation. Mostly that means having enough resources to do things once. We are also hardened perfectionists (individually and collectively) and can get in our own way. So however well we plan, if something goes wrong, it can throw us off for an entire production cycle. And sometimes the nature of that smaller production encourages more issues. Both shortages are the result of production anomalies.
We made full batches of TL50's along with the 35's and 65's we made at the same. We have to make them together because their isn't enough demand to make each size as its own batch. Having fully
paid to cut and finish the TL50's, they went to the laser shop for etching. But because they were done at the same time as 65s and the shop made an error, they came back with the same size indicators as the 65's. We have not been willing to sell 50mm bodies with '65' etched on them. So new ones are waiting for us to need to make more 35's and 65's so we can also make more 50's. We could make 500x TL50's today, but would sell under 100 this year. A taxes on unsold stock take resources away from other projects.
We made a full batches of Wasp head parts, expecting to ramp up quickly to more and more production. Having put all those resources in, we discovered a subtle issue after launch, that we are unwilling to push forward onto our customers. Fixing the issue is requiring 1) making a new unified driver board basically from scratch, 2) purchasing new parts to make the board, 3) testing the new parts to ensure they meet spec, 4) assembling them onto newly etched PCBs, 5) testing the finished boards, 6) installing the new boards and 7) relaunching the Wasps.
Any of the following would speed things up:
- having a huge team
- outsourcing our production
- using off the shelf boards and other parts
- shipping product we are not happy with
- cutting corners on behavior, performance etc
These would make our flashlights less desirable and itself, solve the supply/demand problem. But more importantly, its not who we are and its not who (after we do ship) most of our customers want us to be. We are passed step 3 and pushing hard into step 4. When finished with step 7, I expect for us to be completely exhausted and our customers to be totally ecstatic. I believe the reengineering will have been totally worth it.
