Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Someone COPIED our Screwdriver design!”.
Oh, here’s a here’s, a funny story um this actually did not make it into the making of the screwdriver video that we shot this week because we’re gearing up for launch but um. Have i told the story on wan show before about how the the chinese factory that we’re using now actually cloned our product and then sent it to us what okay? Apparently, i have not told this story, it’s a really. It’S a really funny story. The point that i’m going to be making over the next little bit is that this is a macro product um. You can scan it and reproduce it like. What what like what schematics do you need? It’S not like there are it’s not like. There are ics on it that, where it’s impossible to turn to determine, what’s under the hood and what function it’s performing and where you you would need that in order to repair the board right like it, it’s metal and plastic right, so uh what happened was we Were working with the taiwanese factory right that was supposed to produce these things for us like a year and a half ago or whatever, however, long ago, it was maybe a year ago, and as far as we could tell, what happened was they were acquired by a Large tool manufacturer in order to get around the embargo – or it’s not embargoes, but the uh tariffs on chinese-made tools.
So so this this uh tool brand stopped producing in china bought a taiwan-based tool manufacturer the one that was supposed to make our bloody screwdrivers and then naturally stopped prioritizing our product because they were busy making their own product. There was not good communication around that. I don’t know exactly who to blame that on, but someone and so our pr our project got just stalled installed and stalled, and the quality of the last sample we got from them was atrocious. Just unbelievably bad the worst we’d ever seen, uh, we wouldn’t have considered working with them at that point, even if they we had had the commitment it was just. It was awful, so we pivoted we tried to find another factory to do the work. The good news was that there were a lot of high-quality high-volume chinese factories that were looking for work all of a sudden right yeah because of these these embargoes and whatnot. Because of these tariffs right, oh right, yeah yeah! So we found someone really good, really high volume, really good quality, great reputation and we engaged with them, and it was quite a bit later that we realized that the zinc housing, the mold for it. Well, there were just like a couple of weird like issues with it right, so we got it and we were like yeah. This works, but it’s not the same, and so what we found out had happened was rather than them, making a mistake with our schematics. We somehow got our wires crossed and our drawings were never actually sent to them.
What we sent them was example proper screwdrivers from earlier on, in the sampling process with the taiwan factory. So we got back these these chinese ratchets that were didn’t, implement any recent fixes and weren’t quite right, because what they had done was they had never actually gotten the drivers or the the driver. We just got a screwdriver and they’re like oh, we can make this from us, the customer and they cloned it, and the the wild part is that the clone in a lot of ways was actually better than the taiwan one, even though they didn’t have the drawings And the turnaround wow unbelievable, like they had it back in our hands in like eight days or something like that, so, okay. Well, this ended up being a lot cooler than i expected going into this story.
I was expecting like doom and gloom. This is actually pretty sweet, so we so the good news is, these guys are really good. The bad news is that um, we ended up burning some cycles on this problem and uh, and it did cost us. It did cost us some time but everything’s sorted out.
Now and once we got the actual drawings over to them, they were able to do an amazing job and the ratchets that we have now are better than what we ever had at any stage. Regardless of you know, who did or didn’t have any drawings from the taiwan based factory um, this is actually near final and i have a final one in my backpack now i because uh can, i say both their names publicly. Yes, aj and jonathan are here for the land uh, and i was kind of showing them around because since since they were here last, you know they haven’t been here since ltx. So since they’re since they’re here last, the the grounds as i will describe them now has have changed quite a bit, so i was kind of walking them around, showing them new stuff and we ran into kyle and he showed us the production version so yeah.
It’S pretty sweet. How do you like it uh? It’S? I actually didn’t get to touch it because i needed to get back to working. So i was kind of rushing the tour a little bit um, but uh. I’Ve used previous versions, and i was already pretty happy with it so yeah i think it’d be good.
I’M excited nice. .