Hi folks!

We're on our way to Maker Faire right now! You can find us in the Expo Hall booth #152. We're super excited to see what the Maker community thinks of Skallops, and we hope you join us there today and tomorrow.

We've also shipped all the Red Skallops packs with red and blue packs -- so all the Junior, Starter, and Builder packs are out the door! The Architect packs are on their way, and will be shipping shortly.

Hope to see you this weekend, and we'll have another update for you as we finish up shipping

Busy busy!

Evan.

I don't know why, but something about writing Skallops updates makes me want to write in alliterations.

Anyways, hello everyone! We've been shipping out Skallops as quickly as we can, and we've shipped right about half of all pledges — 502 to be exact. If you've already received your pack, please let us know what you think!

I'll let you know more about what we've been doing below, but first: We're going to be at Maker Faire! It's this upcoming weekend in San Mateo, and it's full of giant robots, cars that shoot fire, Tesla coils, and knitted colossal squids. So basically it's the coolest thing ever.

We're going to be in the main expo hall, on the south side, near the Exploratorium super-booth. We'll have Skallops out for everyone to play with, and we'll be holding contests and build-offs throughout the Faire.

So come stop by and say hi! It's going to be a fun time, I promise.

Okay, so where are your Skallops kits?

It turns out that we misunderestimated how long it would take for our assembly shops to switch between different types of package assembly. If you're keeping score at home, there are sixteen different types of packs to assemble: any pack can have one of four card colors (red, blue, black, or white) and one of four Skallop colors (birch, black, brown, or red).

The assembly shops prefer to not have to switch between these combinations too often, and we prefer to do them in batches, too: it cuts down on confusion and mis-packed or mis-shipped Skallops kits. We've come up with a couple strategies to help keep things moving, but it's still taking a lot longer than we expected to work through all the different combinations.

At this point we've completed Birch, Black, and Brown Skallops with regular red and blue cards, and Birch and Red Skallops with Architect cards. We've got Red Skallops with red & blue cards on their way back to us in the next day or two, and the rest of the Architect packs following that. As you can see in the photo, keeping track of all the different orders is a little more complicated than we realized it would be when we set up the rewards.

We'll have another update for you soon as we keep shipping kits. Also, as the kits go out, our shipping system will automatically send you an email with tracking info. So keep an eye out for an email from E&M Labs, too!

Logistically yours,

Evan, Mike, Robin & Marshall.

Hi folks,

Well, the big day is here! The Skallops cards and the packaging both arrived at the end of last week, and we dropped off the first batch of everything on Friday morning to the assembly shops we're working with here in the Bay Area.

We're getting ready to start shipping kits in the next few days. Pictures and more details are below, but first: did you move? If so, please send us your old address and new address via Kickstarter message or email to support@em-labs.com . We'll update your form, and make sure your kits go to the right place.

This morning, I picked up two final check-off samples of fully assembled kits!

(Bigger here, and sorry for the slightly off white balance)

And take a look at those cards---they're pretty snazzy, if I do say so myself:

(Bigger here)

There's actually a neat little printing trick you can't really see in the photo: the Skallops S shape is printed in a slightly glossier finish on the card, and when you catch the light just right, you can see the outline of the Skallops shape in the card. They look really great, and we're all pretty excited about it.

This is a good spot to mention again that everything in your Skallops kits are produced and assembled here in the USA. We're pretty proud of that, and happy to support the local businesses helping us make Skallops a reality.

So what next? Well, we're nearly complete with the laser cutting of the Skallops themselves, so we'll be taking loads of unassembled pieces and bringing back assembled kits.

One slightly complicating factor is that the colors need to be assembled in big batches, so we'll be shipping kits in bunches based on the color or colors you requested. We're still trying to ship in first-pledged, first-fulfilled order, but there'll be bigger batches going out at a time as we get kits of all the different clip colors rounded up.

We're excited to get these out to you, and hear back what you think! We'll keep posting updates as we have news. For more frequent updates, check us out on Twitter at @skallops, too.

Cheers!

Evan.

Hey Folks!

Last weekend we were fortunate enough to have our own booth at PAX East.  The experience was absolutely incredible.  We brought along T-shirts, buttons, postcards, and thousands of our prototype Skallops for people to play with.

We also hosted design challenges throughout the weekend.  There was the "tallest-tower-with-10-Skallops" challenge, the "longest-bridge-span-with-20-Skallops" challenge, and the incredibly popular "silliest hat" challenge.

The convention hosted over 80,000 people and lasted 3 incredible, crazy days. The gamer community loved the toy; videos and reviews are starting to pop up all over the Internet.

If you'd like to see more pictures or watch some of the fan videos, check out facebook.com/skallops (now featuring actual content!)  We'll be posting a lot of little updates on Facebook from now on, so "like" us to stay in the loop.

Last but not least, you're probably wondering where your kits are.  I have good news!  The custom cards are on their way. We expect the shipment to arrive this Thursday, plus or minus a day.  When that happens our packaging/shipping pipeline will be primed, and the first kickstarter orders will be shipped a few days after that!  We've already cut out over 75 thousand Skallops, and we can't wait to start shipping them out to our awesome backers.

Hope you all had fantastic weekends as well,

Marshall