Hi All,

In yet another critical screw up by my suppliers/factory, I was just made aware (after the fact of course) of a production issue impacting incoming pods and the upgraded usb-c ports.

Here’s the “tea”:

1. At some point between china and us customs, 40% of my ordered units were “misplaced” and still yet to be found. It’s now 100%  confirmed. Mostly steel pods missing but many are MIA and presumably gone forever or stolen.

2. I immediately modified my next shipment to include more units (550) to make up for the missing units. I was given 200 units “for free” as compensation. Half were sent ahead to arrive in time for the powder to get here, so no big deal.

3. The factory forgot to order the updated usb-c ports for these pods as they were remaining stock from the massive amounts of cancelled orders due to the tariff problems earlier last year and “mistakenly” shipped those units via air with the old ports.

4. Noticing the problem immediately after shipping, they rushed to make the new usb-c boards to swap out the old boards in the other unshipped units and hopefully get the new boards shipped to me express before I noticed. Except forcing me to manually replace all 250+ boards by hand would be pretty noticeable.

5. The supplier of the boards used the wrong plug style and now none of the new boards are usable because the wires don’t fit. So now at the 11th hour, they are contacting me at 2am on a Saturday the week before the new pods arrive to give me the “bad news”. Bad is an understatement to me.

6. It’s now chinese new year, so no new orders can be made until march. The boards as is are useless and need to be redone to fit the wires or new wires made. 

Here’s what I can do:

1. I can try to source acceptable wires with matching plugs locally/domestically, assuming they didn’t mess anything else up on the board, I’m not sure how hard this will be. So far, they haven’t given me to specs of the wrong plug.

2. I can ship the units with the old ports as is so that you fine folks can get your orders and I will deal with the inevitable failures of some units by repairing them.

Aiming for option 1 but it’s a stretch.

I have to say I am up against a wall after these compounding issues. Between the surprise tariffs in 2025, the customs delays and the myriad of basic production screw ups (or intentional corner cutting?) that chip away at my finances and mental health, the hope I had before Christmas is at an all time low. 

I was going to use 300 of these incoming units to start selling on amazon in hopes of increasing revenue. I’m at roughly minimum wage right now if that. This will set my plans back at least 2 months when I need a win the most. Right now, my goal is to cover the rent, stay alive, and get you your pods. 🙏

New production issues - I’m really trying..