NEW Prototypes and "Shop Update"

But, if you want to learn a little bit about, "What on earth actually goes on INSIDE Magnus' brain ...and inside his business?", then stick around. :-D

Were you here a year ago? Actually, not even a year ago, just six months ago?

Up until six months we used to run the business mostly on "pre-orders". I would create a new design, I would offer this design, customers would pre-order it, and then we would produce and ship them.

The biggest issue was we would pretty much ALWAYS be late. Why am I telling you this? Well, a couple of reasons...

Firstly, in the past, this blog post I'm writing just now would typically me just explaining -- every single week -- exactly why the sliders everyone pre-ordered were still late. It was bad for the customers and, honestly, it was bad for us too.

We get lots of requests to do pre-orders again - but it just doesn't work for us unfortunately. I mean, I'm not saying I'll never do them ...but it's unlikely.

Here's the thing...

I do hear all of these things. But there are generally three reasons I don't do anything about them:

#1 - It's ALWAYS a super-small minority (relative to the number of products we make and sell). For example, someone did a Poll on Facebook the other day for me to make sliders with a more symmetrical layout like I used to. 18 people voted for this -- when I last checked -- which is nowhere near enough. It's an incredibly small minority unfortunately.

#2 - Each person only has their own, single experience with our products. They're not seeing the large number of emails we get when a product has an issue. And these are emails from a range of different people (for some people it's their first slider ...and for others it's their 50th from us).

As an example, we get lots of requests for the older "V2" version of our dimple plates. The BIG problem is that -- even though most people found them great -- it was a customer service nightmare for us. A number of people would find they scratch badly ...and there was enough of those that it didn't become viable to make them at all. Now, I get it, many people say they were the best plates ever ...but, from our experience, they were not good.

It is near impossible for me to get across to each individual person that, just because their experience with a particular set of plates (as an example) has always been amazing ...there are lots of people who encounter endless problems with the exact same plates. Like I said, trying getting people to understand this -- to understand the "big picture" of working with hundreds of customers who don't have the same positive experience of plates as they do -- is something I have had to give up on really.

#3 - You may have noticed this already ...but I tend not to stick with the same thing (most other makers tend to do a lot of the same thing over and over compared to us). I'm always pushing for new things. New plates, new designs, improving, tweaking, and so on. I've not psycho-analyzed myself too much about this ...but I'm sure there is some sort of psychological issue going on here.

Which brings me to...

The #1 thing we are ALWAYS aiming for is:

This truly is what we are doing here at Magnus. The thing is... the better your experience... the more we as a team enjoy what we do (yeah, selfish, I know).

Some may never be made -- and some will definitely be made. It's a sort of "show and tell" of what is currently going on in the workshop right now. :-)

If they're something here you like, then now is your chance: