Sonny Community,
A piece of unfortunate news to share – our CM (contract manufacturer) based in Guangdong has decided to drop us as a customer after completing the current 100-unit build we have scheduled. As we discussed in our last update, this build addresses all of the previously identified design and tolerance stack up issues - it is critical to making sure we are ready to shift into production. Our current CM has agreed to complete this build by March 20th at which point we will need to transition our project to a new partner.
Why is our CM dropping us?
Internal circumstances and priorities can shift for any business, especially in supply chain management & manufacturing after such a turbulent year. The management team at the manufacturer explained that they were stretched internally and have spent the last couple of months reevaluating allocation of space and resources inside their factory. Coming out of Chinese New Year, they determined that they had to cut ten projects and regrettably Sonny was one of them. As a young hardware company building our first product, we were aware that we presented some inherent risk to any potential manufacturing partner. And we were very aware that our inability to (initially) commit to a high volume production run would put us "on the bubble" (15k units might seem like alot but it barely meets the minimum order quantity for most CM’s). While we did everything we could, including the recent addition of more design and engineering support, we were unable to convince them to keep us on board. Given how close we are to finalizing the product and ramping up to wide scale production, this is especially disappointing news.
What is our plan moving forward?
We have already begun to identify several new CM’s within the Guangdong province and are meeting with them in the coming days to fully vet them and their capabilities. Transitioning a new product in development and it’s tooling (injection molding, compression molding and extrusion die) over to a new CM involves a thorough review of all DFM (design for manufacturability) and NPI (new product introduction) documentation. We are doing our best to expedite and streamline this process. Transferring the OTS parts and PCB components we have already purchased will not be an issue.
How will this impact our shipping timeline?
TBD. There are two key factors here. Identifying and onboarding our project with a new CM (our top priority at the moment) and completing and testing the units from our upcoming build in mid-March. These two things are happening in parallel and we will have updates to share on each soon.
To reiterate, this development, along with several updates we have recently shared, is not how we envisioned or planned for this process to unfold. While it’s not always pleasant, we will continue to be as open and honest with you all about our product development journey.
We apologize for all the delays associated with delivering your orders. We will keep pushing forward with a dedicated and unwavering commitment to deliver something worthy of your support and patience.
Please note, we have included a couple reminders below.
With gratitude,
Team Sonny
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Refund Requests
Please be aware, we cannot issue any refunds at this time. We are currently procuring parts, materials and components to hit our MOQ and be fully prepared to kick off manufacturing once production validation testing is complete and we are within our target production yield. We are responsible for these upfront expenses prior to ramping up to wide scale production. Once shipping begins we will individually confirm order details (in chronological order) and issue as many refunds as we can to the backers that have expressed interest. We hope you understand the timing sensitivity here.
