I am sorry about that! Having John contact both you and Hyper to make sure things are okay, and to make sure we make you happy.
** Note: I pulled this from the thread it was sitting in and moved it here to the Men’s forum. It’s slightly off topic, but I want to make sure as many people as possible read it, and the Men’s Forum is the busiest. I know not everyone watches the Store Announcements Forum where this belongs.
To anybody with delays in customs, please note:
We send out over 30 custom orders a day, many same and next day. Same and next day is always what we shoot for, despite what the cart says. We say 2 to 10 just to cover a disaster or an accidental out of stock situation (which can happen with customs since the cart can’t accurately track milligrams of pheromones left - it’s just not in its programming at this time).
John, I, or our supervising formulator worked non-stop these past few weeks to make the new MXs and to re-stock the Ps, so that wasn’t the issue it may appear to be.
The few “minor disasters” we had that caused some delay were annoying, but so far not fatal.
*First (Most Relevant): US Cobalt Bottle Shortage.
**
First, and perhaps more relevant here, our bottle supplier ran of of the 30ml bottles we normally use. They didn’t receive their own shipment, so we didn’t receive ours. The other 3 known US sources of the exact same bottle and top were also “out”; looks like nobody received their shipment.
We had to go to a different source to get a slightly different version of the bottle, then quality test it to make sure it was an acceptable replacement. This caused a bit of a gap in production, even in custom To Gos, as problems like this tend to cascade and spread to everything.
Supplier problems can be a bit like leprosy. They’re core issues and are systemic, spreading everywhere the long they go on.
Second: Office Move.
We moved the office, while continuing preparation and tweaking. The office was very full the last few weeks, as John, I, an HVAC tech and a handyman sometimes got in the way getting the new lab up to standard.
Btw, fixing or improving facility issues is slow in LA. Codes and regulation have the perverse effect of making the buildings sort of old and crummy, instead of safer and more modern. Airflow and cooling problems really hit us hard in our move. Too many things offgas in our line of work not have effective airflow.
The infrastructure in LA overall is sort of backwards to what a city should have, which causes unforeseen delays. Even FedEx sometimes decides to randomly not show up. Weird LA problems that many other cities don’t have. That gets in the way of the day to day a bit, but we’ve learned to work around that with time. We have experience with this, and do our best.
It’s frustrating, but we don’t consider this to be the issue it used to be. John was surprised, though, as this was his first taste of trying to “operate” in LA. It wasn’t pretty at first!
Third: Typical Ongoing Business Interruption Attempts
There’s also the forum (trolls, hackers, phantom neg reppers, agent provocateurs) and outright business interruption (Adwords fraud, botnets, etc.) attacks a project like ours attracts from the seemingly restless peanut gallery and some the outright criminals in the old school tell-‘em-anything-to-make-a-sale "pheromone industry’.
These have been fairly low grade the past few weeks, thankfully, and Jacob and Ben’s jobs shouldn’t have been directly impacted as far as I know. Unless, of course, one of our irksome pests coordinated the buy out of all 30ml cobalts in the country, just like the time Bill Gates was said (by a comedian) to have tried to buy all the pants in the US as a prank. 
Make no bones about it, that does effect processing and growth in a very core and in a long term way. It prevents us from moving ahead and sometimes even sets us a bit back, but usually doesn’t effect as much of the immediate day to day. Jacob and Ben usually operate blissfully unaware of these issues most of the time until the occasional outright financial attack occurs and we can’t order suppliers or pay them for their time.
Again, most recent issues have been low grade recently compared to some in the past. I can’t say it doesn’t effect us, but it’s not as dramatic as it has been in the past. Most of these creeps are probably on vacation. Thank god! May their idle hands find bliss in more positive endeavors.
Lastly:
Again, none of that should’ve been fatal to shipping customs. I’m actually surprised to see delays of 10 days. While John and I have been in office every day the past few weeks, we’ve seen Jacob furiously formulating customs, Ben shipping all the while. It was difficult to detect any any obvious problems the past few weeks, but obviously some things slipped through and I’m sorry for having no picked up on it earlier.
The good part is: We’ll use any problem you guys present to us to fix anything in workflow we can.
Again, we aim to deliver more than we promise on our home and policy page. When something like that happens, and we haven’t made any announcements to the forum about large issues, please write jlavalle@androtics.com.
We’ll work hard to make you guys happy, and we’ll continue to tweak the systems more to reduce the likelihood of such problems occurring. You just need to make sure you elevate serious or long lasting problems to John or I (preferably John as I work more on innovation and growth than operations now), so we can look at the big and little pictures and see where the sticking points are.
Thank you,
Jasmin
PS – Please keep in mind, we are also trying to move much of the non-custom work out of the lab and to a fulfillment house – that should help a lot. Too often our formulators are shipping items anybody could ship. It’s a waste of precious resources, and sometimes an unnecessary wrench in the gears.
I know some of you guys don’t like the idea of this, but if it works, it should help us do everything better and focus our limited resources on the things that matter more. Androtics HQ is about innovation, and innovation only. That means new MXs, new Ps, more customs, more blind testing and feedback. More research and development.
Even Steve Jobs at Apple likes to say they don’t have the resources to do X, Y and Z, even though they have all the money in the world compared to most companies (over $25B in cash). What he means is even with all that money, he still doesn’t have enough people on his team to do more. Even with more than 30k people, he still says that. Amazing.
“We’re the largest startup on the planet.” - Steve Jobs, D8 Conference Jun 1, 2010, 10:37pm.
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University:Apple: The World’s Largest Startup
We’re literally about the size of a pizza parlor, a spec of dust in comparison to Apple. Yet I’ve counted almost as many suggestions on the forum to us, as Apple it seems Apple gets on Apple forums. Seems like it, anyway, as it induces much of the same overwhelm when I read either.
I want to make it clear I appreciate every drop of feedback. It’s when it’s contradictory, that it’s overwhelming.
For example, you can’t necessary have a triad of high touch service, high quality products and the lowest prices from a tiny company. Even when you deal with a well funded company like Zappos, you do pay a bit more for the fantastic service and overnight shipping. The world isn’t quite up to a Star Trek level of efficiency yet!
While we’ve done a lot and amazed people, we honestly have extremely limited resources and we’ve spread those resources too thin trying to please everybody, all of the time. That often ends up pleasing nobody.
Please bear with as we re-organize around our roots. Innovation over everything else.
We don’t want to become almost arrogant no-sayers like 37signals.com, but we do need to be far more focused. More like a laser than a lightbulb. More project oriented like Apple, “the world’s largest startup.”
PPS – The new cart, which will be coming along within a month hopefully, should help a lot, too.
CRM (customer relations manager) is built-in to the cart itself, instead of being outside of it like Kayako is now. Less “changing systems” is good.
Second, it integrates more closely with payment gateways which also reduces admin time when products are added later by customer service, or an item needs to be refunded. No going into 2 or 3 systems to do something that can occur in 1.
Third, the new cart allows for expanded customer notes, which is also a good thing for this type of project where many orders are customized.
Fourth, it’s one of the few carts we’ve found where we can have the actual programmers of the cart help customize it for us in ways that make sense. Most other carts require good 3rd party help, which is fine, but that’s an additional step and doesn’t allow us to communicate our needs to the core programmers. The nearly “one step shop” that the new provider has ultimately makes it a better solution in the long term. I expect this cart to make more sense over the long haul.
