NEW UPDATE ON MOTH BAGS

Whew, finishing these bags was such a process. I’m genuinely sorry for how long it has taken for them to reach you, and especially for how many times the timeline shifted throughout development.

A large part of the delay came from manufacturing issues. Our first manufacturer continued having problems with construction and print alignment even after three rounds of samples, so we ultimately decided to switch factories rather than approve something we weren’t happy with.

Why did we choose the first manufacturer initially?

We had worked with them successfully on previous products, so we had every reason to believe they would be a good fit for this project too. However, these bags turned out to be considerably more complex than the products we had made with them before, particularly when it came to construction and print alignment. After several rounds of sampling, it became clear that they were struggling to produce the designs to the standard we needed.

Once we switched to our second manufacturer, we essentially had to restart development from scratch across all eight bag designs. That made the process much longer and more tedious than we ever anticipated.

The bags also required far more revisions than we initially expected. At the time, we honestly did not have a clear sense of what the final timeline would look like. We provided rough estimates based on the information we had, but many of those estimates ended up being too optimistic as additional issues came up during development. We also wanted to give customers some kind of timeline because we understood how frustrating the delays were.

The good news is that we are finally past that stage. We now have a much more concrete production timeline, and the finished products turned out beautifully. I am incredibly proud of the final result.

I also want to sincerely apologize for the frustration these delays have caused. I completely understand that a wait of nearly two years is far longer than anyone expected.

Throughout the process, I made the decision not to approve an unfinished or lower-quality product simply to get it out the door faster. Whenever something was wrong, we corrected it, even when doing so unfortunately added more time to development.

I know a beautiful finished product does not erase the fact that the wait was extremely long. I do hope, though, that when you finally receive your order, the amount of care and work that went into these bags will be apparent. I wanted to finish the project properly rather than compromise the designs simply to meet an earlier date.

Regarding updates

We did try to keep everyone informed throughout development, but I completely understand that our communication was not always as frequent or clear as it should have been.

Factory changes contributed to some of that uncertainty. During the same period, I also went through two moves and had to deal with a number of immigration and visa-related matters. I mention that to provide context, not as an excuse. Keeping projects moving and communicating with customers was ultimately my responsibility, and I recognize that.

Our business also grew faster than we expected, and it is true that we struggled to scale quickly enough. At the time, there were only two of us working on the business full time without a larger team behind us, and we fell behind.

Because of the timing of the visa process and some other personal circumstances that I don’t want to go into publicly, we were not in a position to hire and train additional staff as quickly as we needed to. I’m very sorry for the impact that had on our customers and timelines.

Thankfully, those circumstances were temporary and we are now in a much better position. We are making strong progress on completing our existing projects, fulfilling outstanding pre-orders, and building a more sustainable team and workflow. We are also continuing to train additional people so that we can handle the workload more effectively going forward.

Since these pre-orders begun 2 years ago, we have significantly scaled back the number of new releases as well. Demand grew much faster than we anticipated, and at the time we simply did not have the experience, systems, or manufacturing capacity to accurately predict how long some of these projects would take. We genuinely believed development would be much faster than it ultimately was.

This has been a huge learning experience for us, and I’m sorry that customers had to experience the consequences of those growing pains. Going forward, we are being much more careful about how many projects we take on at once, how we estimate timelines, and how far along development is before we launch something.

Thank you so much to everyone who has waited patiently through all of this. I know it has been a very long road, and I’m incredibly grateful that we are finally approaching the finish line.