Recently we have had a few people express their disappointment in the delayed timeline based on the original estimated delivery date.  We really get your frustration as we are right there with you.  This is our main focus in life right now and each day it is delay has a huge impact on us as people.  When we posted the project we had a very optimistic timeline from our engineers, and if all had went according to plan, we would have been in production and shipping products before Christmas.  As the old saying goes: "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry."  That is to say, the most carefully prepared plans often go wrong.  In hindsight, it would have worked to have add a few months to the production schedule in the event of potential delays.  In this case our tooling drawings were complete and we were already meeting with the vendor before our Kickstarter project completed.  Upon inspection the vendor was concerned about some of the small sliders in the tool cavity.  There was a lot of back and forth communication...  Essentially the factory was unwilling to cut final tooling until it was proven that the tooling concept would be workable for mass production.  This meant we had to create a prototype tooling to prove our concept for mass production.  Prototype tooling is a lot less expensive but ultimately takes just as long to create as normal tooling (approximately 45 days).  After the proto-tool was complete, it then took several weeks to test inject parts to ensure the tool concept's reliability.  This was a major delay that we could not have foreseen.  Often there are challenges when dealing with a factory's internal tool engineers and their experience of what is or is not feasible.  The prototype tooling worked just as Kaspar and Stefan had intended, and as a bonus we learned a lot about general problems with flow marks, venting and filling that we could address before we made the final tooling.  Our second key delay was in the over mold tooling as we realized we could adjust a few small parts that would dramatically improve sound quality for making normal phone calls.  We felt this was a very important improvement.  Along the way we have also encountered a few small setbacks that were unforeseen, such as sourcing the super thin membranes that do not require us to make a minimum purchase order of 500 kilos or more.  Our sound membranes are tiny and 500 kilograms of this material would serve to create billions of membranes.  Not to worry, we have that sorted as well.  One important point to note is that we are a tiny start up company, and even though our factory likes us and our product, we are not a big priority when they have orders from other clients that turn over hundreds of thousand of units.  Lastly, communication between adjustments and refinement with the factory simply takes time so making changes is sometimes longer than we've planned for.

CES was an unbelievably intense, amazing, inspiring and exhausting event.  For 4 days straight we were overwhelmed with people who were interested in our product - the press, individual buyers and wholesale distributors world wide.  We even had one individual fly from Japan just to meet us at the show.  (Toshi you ROCK!)  We received our T2 samples which were sent straight from the factory just in time to demonstrate them at the show...  We have to say they are beautiful. They withstood being immersed in a fish bowl for 9 hours each day during the show.  We're happy to report that based upon the quality of the T2 samples, we got a lot of interested customers, retailers and distributors that we need to follow up with.  Our priority to is get the product made and in your hands, and it looks like soon after that... the EscapeCapsule will be out in stores. Our biggest challenge is to figure out how to make enough for the demand. At the show people were consistently complimenting us on our design.  They are initially impressed by how well the touch screen works through the case.  Also, as they put it, our case is interesting because it bridges the gap between a fashion case and a fully covered rugged case.  I.E. they really thought it looked cool.  Ohhh! and we got to meet Seth Green, which was super cool.