Project Updates for Official Catan Collector's Series on BackerKit Page 8

Seafarers First Articles Complete
almost 10 years ago – Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 05:47:39 AM

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your patience with us these past few months. We have a lot of good news on our production progress, so let’s get right into it.

Seafarers Board

First and foremost, we're very happy to be able to announce that the Seafarers mold has run first article parts and the fit is excellent. The Seafarers mold was the primary reason we created and ran this Kickstarter, so this is a big milestone for our company.

I was so relieved the first time I put two Seafarers modules together and saw that everything fit spot on.

We have a few next steps that will be running in parallel. The first step is obtaining custom packaging for the Seafarers Board. A full set will be en route to our packaging vendor's design team on Monday to craft a custom cardboard box for it. We’re designing it to have a space to include two sets of resource card banks in order to help us save on shipping and allow for bonus bundles in the future.

The second step is performing some more machining on the mold to fix some issues. The issues are fortunately minor, but they need to be completed before we can do a large-scale production run.

The primary issue is that the finish on most of the vertical rib area is quite rough, as you can see below:

This causes the part to stick on to the core of the mold and causes the ejector pins to create stress marks on the other side of the part as you can see below:

There's also a bit of overcut on the edges of the port area that will need to be machined down before we send the mold to polishing/texturing:

But all of the important things, such as hex fit, port fit, road and ship fit are all spot on.

Here's a few close-up shots of the fit in the different areas:

We’ll update with a more accurate shipping timeline as soon as we have the final package design in hand. Once the production packaging order is placed it will take about 2-3 weeks for our packaging vendor to produce all the boxes and ship them to our warehouse. Once they arrive on our dock, we’ll begin packaging and shipping immediately.

Catan Collector's Series Production

Our wooden manufacturer is making good progress on all of the bamboo Collector's Series products. He recently sent me a number of photos, so I'll just share them below:

Catan Dice Tower backs being run in bulk. Typically these would be built-in to the CNC layout during bamboo Catan Board production in order to use as much of the bamboo as possible, but during Kickstarter production it's done in bulk.

In the background you can see bulk sheets of bamboo Catan card banks waiting to be routed and sanded into separate parts

All of the internal parts for the Catan Collector's Series Boxes are being produced first, and bulk packaged. Then the Catan boxes themselves will be manufactured and filled for shipment.

The Catan Dice Tower acrylic fronts being lasered

All the felt for the Catan accessories has been lasered and is ready for final assembly.

The Catan Bag

The Catan Bag will be the last item produced and shipped, and production will begin after everything else has shipped. Our vendor for this product came back with a higher price than we were originally told, so we are looking at other vendors. In the meantime, we are focusing on fulfilling every other part of this Kickstarter.

BackerKit

We are waiting for review of our BackerKit, which should occur in the early part of next week. Once those surveys go out, we'll have everyone's most current address and will be ready to begin shipment.

We've set the shipment goal deadline for all bamboo Collector's Series products to be May 31st. So far we are on schedule and we plan on doing everything in our power to meet that deadline.

Thank You

We can’t wait to get everyone’s rewards to them and really appreciate your patience and support throughout the journey to get to this point. We now have production parts for each product you helped launch, and it’s a great feeling.

We noted that Mayfair posted something about them having a plan to fulfill our Kickstarter. We’re not really sure what they meant by that, as they are not the ones fulfilling anything for any of our Kickstarters, but we are proceeding according to plan. We are continuing to move forward to get your rewards to you and bring these products to market.

Thank you

Production Update
almost 10 years ago – Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 11:33:39 AM

Hi everyone,

It's been asked that I publish the updates from our first Kickstarter here as well in order to keep everybody up to date, so here's today's update:

Hi everyone,

We've completed production of all the card banks, and are wrapping up our BackerKit setup. We're beta testing a new feature of BackerKit that allows project creators to provide T-shirt rewards and have them sent out automatically, before all the other rewards. I've always wanted to make a cool Catan T-shirt, so this seemed like a good time to take advantage of this new feature. Here's a sneak peek of the design:

I wanted to create something representative of medieval crests, to show that the person wearing the T-Shirt is a noble citizen of Catan, and wields the power of the knight to grow their kingdom. :-)

The crest design will be white, but we're still deciding which color to place the design on. I'm leaning towards forest green, to represent the Cities and Knights expansion color. We're going to be receiving design proofs of the colors, so maybe we'll do a short poll to see which color would be most preferred by our backers once we get them.

Today also marks the launch of a cool Kickstarter I've been doing some consulting for. The Cardboard Guys are a team of guys who are looking to change the marketplace for kid's furniture. If you think about it, kid's furniture is something of an anomaly in the design industry, as it's the only furniture segment that the target user is guaranteed to outgrow and no longer find useful. There are entire companies dedicated to recycling and reselling kid's furniture/clothing to new users. Not everyone takes advantage of these, though, which means a lot of the furniture just ends up in landfills. The Cardboard Guys have created an affordable and strong desk/chair combo that's made entirely out of cardboard. Not only is it recyclable, it's super robust and is the only furniture that you can actually ENCOURAGE your kids to draw on and customize to make it their own.

I realized after I began working with this team, that the current state of kid's furniture really doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to provide kids with smaller versions of standard furniture. When I was a kid I drew on everything I could get my hands on. Nobody wants to spend money on some Pottery Barn Kids furniture and then have their child grab a Sharpie and turn it into the Castle of Doom. Kids are going to be creative, and the Imagination Desk encourages that, which I think is pretty cool. I don't have any financial stake in their company, I've just been helping them a bit, and I think they're a team of honest, enthusiastic guys who deserve some support to get started. Also, they made a custom one for Catan. I mean come on, how sweet is this: