January Update: Milestones + Coronavirus
about 4 years ago – Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 01:43:59 AM

Hey backers!

January has proven to be a busy and unpredictable month for us. We've fulfilled thousands of units, but have encountered new obstacles such as the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that have added to the workload. We're doing our best to work around everything given the circumstances—let's dive in!

Coronavirus

As you are likely aware, there is an ongoing outbreak of a novel coronavirus that has severely impacted China. We're wishing anyone impacted by the virus a speedy recovery and hope that anyone at risk remains healthy and safe! As our backers know well, we have an office in China, and we've been prioritizing health and safety of our staff as the situation evolves. In late January, our vendors all went on holiday to celebrate the Lunar New Year. However, as the outbreak evolved, local governments extended holidays and have mandated that businesses remained closed even after the holiday ended.

In our case, our vendors, including our lens factory and logistics provider, have not yet resumed operations. Likewise, our warehouse and office has been closed since late January. This means we've been unable to access our inventory and ship our product.

We were actually able to briefly gain access to our warehouse to ship returns and refurbished units on Monday, but building management has prevented access again as the rules seem to be constantly changing from the local government. These steps are being taken as an extreme precaution to prevent the spread of the virus. Additionally, when our lens factory does resume production again, we expect that they'll start off slow before becoming fully staffed again. This means lenses for backers who have only just recently submitted their prescriptions might be a little slow.

Just today, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has announced it is no longer accepting shipments destined for China as there is not enough transport capacity. This is due to many airlines ceasing to operate in the region due to the outbreak. This so far has disrupted global shipments and supply chains, and we and many other companies big and small will continue to be impacted.

The past 3 weeks have been difficult operationally speaking due to these circumstances. We will continue to monitor the situation and will do our best to work around the situation while prioritizing our team's safety. The good news is that we had finished frame production prior to the Lunar New Year, so once our lens partner resumes work, we'll be able to deal with any returned units and any backers who have just recently submitted their pledge info without having to depend on too many vendors. 

Fulfillment

The current operations shutdown aside, we really have hit a stride with our consolidated operations in our office and warehouse. We're now able to perform final inspection, cleaning, and packaging at our office. Before the Lunar New Year, we sent out thousands of units to backers all out of our office! It was exciting, but extraordinarily busy work. Check out a brief time-lapse of this work below.

Now that we've stocked enough inventory in our office to fulfill orders, we're able to source lenses on-demand from our lens partner. This speeds up the process to fulfill considerably.

Currently, the primary reason for a pledge not having been fulfilled is due to backers not sending us their prescription using the SurveyMonkey email. We will be sending out emails every month en masse to collect this missing information, and will fulfill them as we get the data to do so. If you have not sent this in, please look up the SurveyMonkey form in your email titled "Vue Prescription Survey" and send in your prescription. As we switch into direct sales, we will continue fulfilling crowdfunding rewards as we get the information necessary to manufacture each reward.

Customer Support Backlog

We wanted to provide a bit of insight into the customer support backlog.

• In the queue (new or unanswered): 440 
• Pending follow-up: 194 

Please note that this only reflects emails that have been sent to our [email protected] account. We do not conduct customer support anywhere else other than via [email protected]. If you need assistance, do not use social media or Kickstarter private messages—you need to send us an email.

We are working hard to clear the backlog, and will continue working our way through the emails that we have on hand. If you are waiting, hang in there! We appreciate your patience.

Support

We can only conduct support via email. We cannot conduct support over Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Kickstarter messages. You must email [email protected] for support.

Remember the following:

• You absolutely must send support emails from the email using the email that you originally used to make the pledge. For example, we cannot provide account access if you originally used “@gmail.com” but now you email us from “@yahoo.com”. If you don’t do this, we’ll just ask you to email us using the other email and it will extend the time it takes to assist you!

We receive hundreds more emails than normal immediately after posting updates, so we apologize if it takes longer than expected for us to get back to you!

Until next time!

With love,

the Vue team

December Update: Wrapping up 2019!
over 4 years ago – Sun, Jan 05, 2020 at 12:36:55 AM

Hey backers!

We wish everyone a healthy and happy 2020! The end of 2019 was our busiest period yet, as we worked to get thousands of units out the door. We're excited to start this new year by wrapping up crowdfunding fulfillment and preparing for some big changes for Vue! Let's dive in!

Fulfillment

December was a really hectic month. Our logistics partner was getting progressively slower and seemed to be encountering numerous problems with shipments. Sometimes entire batches were getting returned from customs with little explanation, shipping addresses were incorrect, or parcels were lost in transit.

We made the decision to pull nearly 3,000 units back to our office so we could switch logistics providers. Unfortunately, this meant we had to manually sort all of those units to prep them for our new logistics partner. Backers might recall that we had moved into a new office late last year that was more spacious. While it's been working great for us, it was definitely not suited for storing so many units! Check out a picture of what the office looked like below.

It took us a few weeks to completely clear out all of the backlog, as we were manually sorting thousands of units—you can see what some of this day-to-day looked like in the video below.

The work has paid off as recent shipping batches seem to be more streamlined and generally arrive domestically within 6-10 working days from shipment.

After we finished the fulfillment backlog, it was time to start receiving our stock inventory! As crowdfunding fulfillment winds down, we'll phase into direct sales, and will be keeping inventory on hand to fulfill orders. This has also taken up a lot of space!

We're really excited to be entering a new phase for Vue. We feel that we've had some of the best backers, and your communication and feedback regarding your rewards has been really insightful for us. We've published 3 updates to the Android app in the last month and have more in the pipeline. We have also begun work on big iOS updates and will be publishing those in the coming weeks as well. 

As always, we'll make sure backers are updated as we work on these software updates and beyond. 

Fulfillment backlog

While we have effectively fulfilled all of the campaign's pledges, there remain a few areas that haven't been completely fulfilled yet. We'll outline them below:

1. For backers that had any issues with their unit (returning it due to defect, package lost in transit, incorrect reward delivered, lenses damaged during production), we have submitted all of these to our factories for replacement. There are several hundred units pending reassembly, and we expect most of these to be finished by this month (January).
2. Some backers have still never submitted their prescription to us despite selecting a prescription lens, and have still not responded to our follow-up emails requesting these details. When this happens, their production gets put on hold as we cannot make the lenses without the prescription details. We'll be sending out mass-emails to these backers from here on out, and will fulfill these rewards when the information rolls in.

We will continue working to resolve these issues for backers. We know customer support has been really, really slow. As a small team, we've at times struggled to keep up with the inquiries while managing mass production for tens of thousands of units and an extraordinarily complex supply chain. If you have any concerns about your pledge—please email us! If we're slow to reply, just hang in there. We'll work through any backlog and get to your concerns.

Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

For any backers planning to be at CES in Las Vegas in January, we'll be there! Please shoot us an email if you plan to be there, and we'll have members of the team follow up if they're able to meet up. We've seen backers there every year, and would love to meet some of you face-to-face to talk about your rewards, hear your feedback, and talk about our thoughts around V2 development!

Support

We can only conduct support via email. We cannot conduct support over Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Kickstarter messages. You must email [email protected] for support.

Remember the following:

• You absolutely must send support emails from the email using the email that you originally used to make the pledge. For example, we cannot provide account access if you originally used “@gmail.com” but now you email us from “@yahoo.com”. If you don’t do this, we’ll just ask you to email us using the other email and it will extend the time it takes to assist you!
• If you used the order lookup tool and either didn't receive the code, or got an email saying you weren't found in the database, send us an email. The tool has a few bugs and there is most likely nothing wrong with your pledge!

We receive hundreds more emails than normal immediately after posting updates, so we apologize if it takes longer than expected for us to get back to you!

Until next time!

With love,

the Vue team

November Update: Mass Fullfilment
over 4 years ago – Wed, Dec 04, 2019 at 12:29:08 AM

Hey backers!

Welcome to November's update! We're getting close to the end of 2019 and we're on track to close out the year strong with near complete fulfillment. Let's dive in!

Production

We've hit a stride in production and things are running smoothly. We are on track to effectively complete fulfillment by the end of the year. Check out some sights from our office lately as we continue to support shipping out thousands of glasses! Our label maker is constantly humming as it prints out thousands of labels for each batch.

We've also just finished a move into a new, larger space for our operations in China. Our previous space was far too small to support the volume of manufacturing we do. Though the factory handles the vast majority of all units, we do have a fair number of units that require some special handling prior to shipment. In our previous space this meant virtually every desk, including each of our own, was being used to help store or package these up. It was getting to the point where it was affecting our daily operations, so this new space has been super helpful from an operations standpoint!

The new space has enough room for a dedicated logistics space where we can perform all the packaging we need to do without encroaching on our own desk space!

As we continue to fulfill, we've been tracking with excitement where everything has gone all over the world. It's really incredible to think that at the start of this campaign, we were a small team with a simple idea, and we now have tens of thousands of Vue Glasses delivered to backers all over the world! Check out this map below of all the countries where we have active Vue users!

Production Stats

We wanted to put some of this into perspective for backers. Below are the numbers summarized by various production states for all the Kickstarter pledges we're able to fulfill:

•  Fulfilled: 93%
•  Currently in production: 3%
•  Waiting to receive lenses: 3%
•  Currently being re-worked: 1%

There are some backers who still have either not submitted their prescriptions, or who submitted their prescription with errors. We will continue following up via email to collect this information, at which point it will generally take about an additional 5 weeks to fulfill.

Re-works

Another area that has taken quite a bit of time has been dealing with replacing lenses. There are a variety of reasons that lenses need replacing—they were damaged during production, manufactured incorrectly, or someone sent an updated submission. In all cases, these lenses need to be set aside, and we need to communicate the re-do back to our lens partner. We keep these on-hand so that we can keep track of and have a record of them. You can see the stack of these in our office:

The final batches of shipments that are going out now through the end of the year will include both the final lens deliveries from our lens partners as well as any units that had issues and were scheduled for re-work. In any case, they are in progress and will be shipping soon!

Production Lookup Tool

Many backers have emailed in for a status update, which has been really time-consuming for us as we need to individually lookup up each order within our database and then send a reply. To remedy this, we've made a lookup tool that lets backers lookup their production status themselves! To use the tool, head on over to order.enjoyvue.com and enter the email address you used to make your pledge.

Note that you must use the email that you originally entered for your pledge, as the system will email you a verification code that is used to gain access to your pledge. Below is an example of what you might see when you log into the lookup tool.

Here you can see your address on file as well as all the glasses you've pledged for. Under "Order Status" you will see the current state for a particular pair of glasses. If you have multiple glasses, the status of each pair will be shown.

Below are the statuses you will see:

1. Lens details OK, waiting for submission to factory.
2. Lens information sent to lens factory.
3. Lenses made, awaiting shipment to assembly factory.
4. Lenses made, arrived at Vue's office.
5. Lenses delivered to assembly factory, awaiting assembly.
6. Lenses assembled, awaiting shipping carrier pickup.
7. Handed off to shipping carrier.

There are some errors with orders that we display here too. The most common errors are below:

•  Data missing = prescription was never submitted.
•  Data suggests plano = backer pledged for a prescription lens, but inputted "0" for everything.
•  SKU not progressive = backer provided a progressive prescription, but didn't pledge for progressive lenses.
•  Missing progressive data = backer pledged for progressive lenses, but didn't input progressive data. 

We will be sending follow-up emails to these backers who have errors so we can get them resolved, as we aren't able to make their lenses until these errors are fixed. 

We think this will be a useful tool for those who want to know their production status, and will also help offload some of the customer support from us as we can point backers to a place where they can check this directly. 

Software Updates

We've been getting a lot of feedback and are aware that some folks have had persistent issues on Android. We are working on a huge update for the Android app, with a particular focus on connectivity issues. We are targeting a release for sometime this month, likely toward the end of the month. We've already started work on this and it's involving rewriting a lot of the pairing code from scratch, which is a considerable amount of work and testing. We want to make sure that pairing is as smooth and straightforward for all our backers, so we're doing a pretty deep dive here.

We're also working on other bug fixes across both apps, including an iOS dark mode fix, some menu issues between imperial and metric units, some issues with the login process, and more. We appreciate all our backers who have been sending in these tips, and we will keep working on preparing these updates!

Support

We can only conduct support via email. We cannot conduct support over Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Kickstarter messages. You must email [email protected] for support.

Remember the following:

• Check your production status at order.enjoyvue.com.
• We are no longer accepting changes to frame styles, colors, or lens types.
• You absolutely must send support emails from the email using the email that you originally used to make the pledge. For example, we cannot provide account access if you originally used “@gmail.com” but now you email us from “@yahoo.com”. If you don’t do this, we’ll just ask you to email us using the other email and it will extend the time it takes to assist you!

We receive hundreds more emails than normal immediately after posting updates, so we apologize if it takes longer than expected for us to get back to you!

Until next time!

With love,

the Vue team 

October Update: Happy Halloween!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Nov 01, 2019 at 02:48:07 AM

Hey backers!

Welcome to October's update—and Happy Halloween! As always, it's been a busy month. We're close to some big milestones for this project, and we're excited to share those with you all. Let's dive in! 

Backers in Vue

It's been awesome to see backers around the world unboxing and wearing their glasses! We wanted to highlight a few recent pictures, seen below. 

Fulfillment Progress

The good news is that we have officially completed 81% of Kickstarter fulfillment! We expect nearly all remaining Kickstarter rewards, and the majority of our pre-orders, to be delivered in November. However, many pledges might take longer if they have not provided us with complete information.

In general, pledges can be broken up into 3 groups:

1. Complete pledges: These are from backers who have sent us all their info, including address, prescription, etc. We expect to finish shipping these in November.
2. Re-worked pledges: Pledges which have encountered issues during manufacturing. Perhaps they received a defective unit or their lenses were damaged during production. Whatever the case, we've had to start over on these units, which has led to their pledge taking much longer than expected to finish. We'll aim to finish these in November, but it could take until December (especially if their lenses have to be re-done).
3. Incomplete pledges: Pledges who have still not sent us all the details required to make their pledge. These folks might not have sent us their address or prescription, or haven't specified their frame style, or have not yet paid for upgrades. These folks likely have 1-2 months before getting their pledge since we can't even start to work on their units until they give us the details necessary to do so.

For those in group 3, we'll send reminder emails, but we can't estimate timelines for them until they send us their details.

Production

Production has been running more smoothly lately. The bottleneck continues to be lens production, but our frame production levels are up to sufficient volumes where we can assemble larger volumes when lens batches are delivered. In fact, we've just recently handed off 2,800+ units to our logistics partner!

We're producing with enough volume to book full production lines for ourselves, whereas before we've had to book smaller production lines as we weren't capable of large enough volumes for our factory to justify assigning more staff to our project.

Check out the video below for what a fully staffed (~60 people) production line looks like while Vue is being made!

The team continues assisting production by packaging many rewards by hand! Some days, the office feels like a full-fledged logistics center.

What's next?

As we move toward complete fulfillment, we'll start using these monthly updates to talk about our next steps. The delivery of the V1 Kickstarter rewards is just the beginning. We'll be in touch with backers to discuss app and firmware updates, go over positive and negative feedback from backers, as well as discussing V2 development and timelines. We'll also reflect on what went well and what did not go well throughout the campaign, and how we're making efforts to improve our products going forward.

Timelines

• Kickstarter: November (longer for pledges that had issues or were missing information).
• Pre-orders: Delivery begins in November alongside final Kickstarter batches, and will continue through December.

Support

We cannot conduct support over Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Kickstarter messages. You must email [email protected] for support.

Remember the following:

• Check your shipping address at vue.backerkit.com. If it needs changing, email [email protected].
• We are no longer accepting changes to frame styles, colors, or lens types.
• You absolutely must send the email using the email that you originally used to make the pledge. For example, we cannot provide account access if you originally used “@gmail.com” but now you email us from “@yahoo.com”. If you don’t do this, we’ll just ask you to email us using the other email and it will extend the time it takes to assist you!

We receive hundreds more emails than normal immediately after posting updates, so we apologize if it takes longer than expected for us to get back to you!

Until next time!

With love,

the Vue team

September Update: Fulfillment Update
over 4 years ago – Tue, Oct 01, 2019 at 01:48:20 AM

Hey backers!

Welcome to the September Update! We've continued to make progress on shipping rewards, and have begun delivering colors beyond Carbon Fiber for both Classic and Trendy styles! Let's dive in!

Production

Mass production continues, as does our work supporting the manufacturing lines. Our biggest bottleneck right now is the rate of lens delivery. Our lens partner has a limited daily/weekly output, and the number of units we're able to assemble is entirely dependent on how many units they ship to us in each batch. 

That being said, we've been receiving sizable lens shipments and have begun shipping Trendy frames!

We've received batches of sunglass lenses recently as well, and we think the purple tinted lens looks great! 

It's still exciting every time we ship out a batch from our factory. We've shipped to over 100 countries worldwide so far and have really enjoyed hearing from folks around the world who have been wearing their pair of Vue. 

We also have many pledges with multiple pairs of glasses in them. These are typically stored at our office until all the units in the pledge are finished, at which point they are packaged together and shipped to the backer. Our office has been packed with these boxes lately!

Ongoing Issues

The complexity of making tens of thousands of unique lenses has been, and continues to be, our biggest bottleneck. Our lenses are made in batches by the thousands, which is the fastest way to get them made. Unfortunately that means that if there is a slight drift in the dimensions of those lenses, it's harder to catch.

An example of this can be seen from a recent batch we received for Trendy frames where the lenses were too large and would not fit into the frames. 

The only option is to buff the edges of the lenses with a special machine until the dimensions are reduced, or to have our lens factory completely re-do the entire batch of lenses. Unfortunately, neither solution is quick, and inevitably means this particular batch for assembly will be slower. For some backers who expected to receive their reward by now, this might be one of the production issues that is temporarily delaying your delivery. 

Batch Order

Now that we have begun to fulfill both Classic + Trendy rewards, we will be going back through and fulfilling rewards that didn't make it through production the first time around. We've seen many backers note that they have not received their reward despite having either an early backer number or seeing their reward type on the timelines we've posted.

While the timelines provide a rough sense of when most units will ship, they won't apply to everyone. Here are the main reasons your unit might not have shipped yet:

1. Your lens was damaged in production, and has to be re-made.
2. Your specific lens type was low in stock with our lens partner, and we're waiting on new stock to be delivered. 
3. You updated your lens prescription, which bumped you back in the queue.
4. You have multiple pairs, and not all of your pairs have been made.

While we wish we could simply ship in the exact order that every reward was placed, it's not possible. Producing tens of thousands of glasses with multiple styles, colors, and unique lenses is too complex to stay in exact order.

If you have not been notified of shipping yet, hang in there! We appreciate the patience and we will get to you as we continue to work through production. Your notification will arrive via email.

Timelines

We've made good progress, and are now working on Trendy units! Please note that this does not mean we have shipped all Classic units. We'll continue to assemble and ship Classic units as we receive batches of lenses from our lens partner. Due to issues listed in the "Batch Order" section above, our weekly rate of assembly has varied a lot. You'll notice these updates to our timeline below:

We're working hard to fulfill most of the remaining Kickstarter rewards by October! For straggling rewards that haven't shipped (most often because prescription information has still not been submitted), we'll begin shipping those in parallel with our pre-order units. 

Production Lookup Tool

In the past month, we've been overwhelmed with email inquiries. We are a small team, and most of our staff has been nearly full-time at our factories to help move production along, including on weekends. We know everyone is eager to receive their rewards, but with such a small team, emailing us to inquire about your pledge adds hours of work per day for the team. Long-term, we need to grow our support staff so that we can handle this volume, but we're still operating on some strict budgets which has enabled our project to achieve its goals over the years. When backers email us to ask where their unit is, the answer will more often than not be "it isn't ready yet, we'll email you when it is". 

To remedy this, we've been working on an online tool that backers can use to check their production status. We are aiming to launch this tool in the next few weeks. The tool can be used to lookup your exact pledge and its status—meaning you can see whether your lenses have been received at our factory, whether your unit is in production, or whether there is an issue with your pledge that you need to fix. This will help to alleviate the support workload as we'll be able to auto-reply to backers with a link to the dashboard, freeing up hours of time for us to focus on production tasks. 

We urge backers only to email us if there is an urgent issue, like an immediate change of shipping address, or an issue with your reward after delivery, otherwise it adds to our considerable support backlog. We know the wait has been a bummer, and we're working as hard as we can, often times into the early hours of the morning, to keep things moving as fast as we can. We've reassigned some of the team to fully focus on support with the aim of clearing the existing backlog by the end of this week. 

Support

We cannot conduct support over Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Kickstarter messages. You must email [email protected] for support.

Remember the following:

• Check your shipping address at vue.backerkit.com. If it needs changing, email [email protected].
• We are no longer accepting changes to frame styles, colors, or lens types.
• You absolutely must send the email using the email that you originally used to make the pledge. For example, we cannot provide account access if you originally used “@gmail.com” but now you email us from “@yahoo.com”. If you don’t do this, we’ll just ask you to email us using the other email and it will extend the time it takes to assist you!

We receive hundreds more emails than normal immediately after posting updates, so we apologize if it takes longer than expected for us to get back to you!

Until next time!

With love,

the Vue team