Beatbox by Rhythmo - DIY Cardboard MIDI Controller Kit

Custom Cleared!
over 3 years ago – Sat, Aug 14, 2021 at 03:39:14 AM

The OG colorway inventory for UK/EU arrived in the UK over a month ago, and has been stuck there ever since due to some shipping paperwork complications. After a whole month of struggle and headaches we finally got some good words. I'll let the shipping company representative explain:

As of right now, they are waiting on a word from Amazon for delivery time. Again, I'll just let them explain:

We are almost there! UK and EU backers should start receiving their units very soon.

As for the solid case, we are getting a small run on August 18th. We'll assemble a few of these in the office for testing, and we'll send out the rest to our first backers if no more tweaks are required. 

We also had to make some changes to the solid chassis design, namely changing the faceplate from clear to grey, since some of the injection gates can show through the clear plastic. All the side/bottom panels are still going to be clear acrylic though.

Anyways, to all the UK and EU backers that have moved over the past few months, make sure you double check your addresses and let us know if any changes need to be made. Once the product is sent, we'll be sending out tracking information through Amazon!

Some quick shipping updates
over 3 years ago – Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 11:40:19 PM

Honestly, not too much to say on this one. The OG shipment left our storage space about a month ago, as our last update stated - however the freight ship didn't leave the port until June 19th. This is kind of entirely out of our hands, since we can't dictate over freight ship schedules, but they are on their way to you as we speak. We also have no clear tracking information on these (again, freight ships) so we can really only update you once the ship hits the port. If you want to have some fun, the vessel's name is DIMITRA C and you can kind of find their last known position on the internet, although not very real-time.

We are almost done with packing the other 2 pallets of the other colorways, and we should be able to send them to the port this week. Again, that's not necessarily going to mean that they will leave the port this week - that's going to depend entirely on when the next available ship leaves.

On the other hand, all Asian and Australian backers other than mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan should have their units in hand by now. Some of which we definitely undercharged on shipping (one order to Maldives actually costed us $120 just on the shipping itself). All outstanding Asian orders will be sent out this week.

Solid chassis production is moving, all parts other than the top plate is being manufactured right now, we've been having some issues with the top plate's angled design. The fact that it is angled on top makes some of the component holes difficult to release from the mold, so we are adjusting everything as we speak. We should be receiving some production prototypes of the top plate by mid-July, and once we approve that the lead time for the top plate itself is rather short, so hopefully we can get this done by the end of July.

OG Orders for UK and EU shipped!
over 3 years ago – Fri, May 28, 2021 at 01:56:18 AM

We just got all the OG orders for the UK and EU locked and loaded, on their way to Amazon UK, it was quite a process, the freight company straight up ghosted us for 3 days but we FINALLY got it done. There was a lot of physical labor involved, had to learn how to handle and pack pallets and all that, but the shipment is finally out!

They'll likely spend about 3 weeks on ocean, and Amazon will probably take an additional week to process, pack and ship the items out to our backers. Victory is near!

Regarding the Technics and Bubblegum colorways, the shipment just got to us last week and as of yesterday the custom was cleared. They will likely be delivered to our storage facility next week, and we'll try to get all the QC and repackaging done in the week after. Shipping these will be faster since we already got all the process and supplies figured out.

As of orders for Asia and Australia - we got all of those orders sent out to a shipping company in Shenzhen last week, and they are ordering custom shipping boxes right now. These orders should be shipped via DHL or UPS next week, depends on your location, and since these are going out as parcel, they will get to you a lot faster. You should start to receive packages in about a week or so. We'll be uploading tracking numbers to BackerKit as soon as they go out, so please keep an eye on those since any lost package would cost a LOT to us on these international orders.

Anyways, if you are in the EU, UK, Asia or Australia, and need to change your addresses, let us know ASAP on https://www.rhythmo.io/contact-us . There's very little time now before things are absolutely finalized, and I'd really hate to fail to deliver to any of you after this entire process. Thank you so very much for all of your patience, and we are almost there!

International Shipping, Stuck Buttons, Current State of Add-Ons
over 3 years ago – Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 04:22:06 AM

Wow, lots of anxious comments out here. Sorry about the lack of updates lately - a lot of things were in the air this past month and we couldn't really talk much about what we aren't sure of. Anyways, some good news this time.

All orders in the US other than some Bubblegum colorway units, and all orders in Canada should be either shipped, or we have reached out to you regarding some address issues. We are only talking about the base unit and the button upgrades here. If you haven't received anything or any word from us, let us know on the Contact Us page on our site: https://www.rhythmo.io/contact-us

The reason why we wanted to use our Contact Us page for communications is that it alerts the entire team, there's both audio alert and email alert too, so it's a lot easier to keep track of.  Given everything that's going on, it's a lot more efficient if most communications are done in one place. We will continue to post updates of consolidated information here though, at least until all orders are fulfilled.

Regarding UK and EU shipping, things were a lot complicated than originally thought. DHL parcel to the UK was significantly more expensive than what our DHL rep quoted us on - we are talking over $50 just for the UK, and VAT on top of that, and it's even more expensive for the rest of EU. When shipping is getting almost as expensive as the perk itself, it makes very little sense. We had to dig into possible channels for fulfillment, and multichannel fulfilling through Amazon UK seemed perfect. In order to do this, we are shipping pallets of units to Amazon UK warehouses, and leaving the individual order of fulfillment to them, since for any Amazon listing, they also can handle fulfillment for orders made elsewhere, with a small service fee. Amazon UK also ships to the rest of EU as well for a pretty affordable price. It took us a few weeks to get all the registrations and listing done on Amazon, but we have everything now. This is also beneficial for us to retail in the UK and EU market in the future, since we'll have inventory readily available in the UK.

We also had to take some time to figure out VAT. 20% VAT for the final sales price is... a lot to say the least, and since this is going to be an Amazon listing, we can't just fill out whatever we wanted as the item value for VAT (well, we were never supposed to do that anyways, if any UK official is reading this, we never thought about it ever). The only strategy seems like registering for a limited company in the UK, since there is a £85,000 sales threshold annually before they actually charge a British company VAT, which we are definitely under for this batch. This was kind of a tricky process, involving us having to get a hold of an address in the UK and all, but as of today, our company registration is approved by Company House! But yeah, literally was waiting on this one piece alone to update you all, since if it wasn't possible for the company to be registered, we'd have to find a whole other method.

Oh, and good thing that Brexit hasn't called for separate VAT's for UK and EU yet, so we don't have to worry about EU VAT by itself for now. Not sure what this is going to be like in the future though. Politics.

Another complication is that our second half of inventory shipment was delayed by another month. This batch is all the inventory that was intended for the UK and EU, and all of our Bubblegum and Technics units. As you might remember from one of our updates late 2020, the manufacturer mistakenly used a glossy cardboard box for our colored units, which wasn't approved by us. As a result, we only got enough of these colored units to fulfill our US and Canadian orders, and told them to rework the rest. This shipment was delayed quite a few times, initially supposed to arrive in March, but as it turns out, one of the battery certificates expires every December 31st, although we only got the certificate back in October (isn't this a stupid regulation?), so we missed that cargo ship having to go back and get the certification again. After which, the shipment was supposed to be on a cargo ship that arrives in mid April, which got delayed AGAIN due to that one ship that was stuck at the Suez Canal, according to the cargo company. Now it's finally on the way here, and it's getting here early May.

We do have enough of the OG colorway in hand for UK and EU orders, which we are currently reloading the Android firmware for and packing. This is also a time consuming process, since we are pretty much re-assmbling and packing the kits again. The good thing is we definitely got a better quality control process than our original manufacturer, so the unit that ends up in your hand would be 100% perfect. We should be able to get all the OG colorway units ready to go to Amazon UK in a week or two. This doesn't mean that you'll get them in two weeks though, since ocean freight to the UK and Amazon delivery is still going to take some time.

The add-ons are still in the works, but from everything you see above, I think it's pretty clear that our time is very limited at the moment and the add-ons just aren't our top priority at the moment. We have finalized on the Solid Chassis design and we have quotes for the molds, and we'll post another update on this once the shipping situation is sorted out more.

We have left a small batch of 100 units or so with our manufacturer in Shenzhen for our orders in Asia and Australia. We should be fulfilling all of our Asian orders this month since the cost is still managable, but shipping to Australia is getting pretty expensive. We'd need to figure out a bulk shipping channel for Australia as well, for now we are thinking about Amazon AU, but this is going to take some time to look into.

A lot of backers in the US have reported some sticky button issues, after digging into it a bit, we found that the cause is due to the button supplier using a different style of buttons on all Rhythmo Technics units without informing us. This is quite an easy issue to fix on your own though, we are talking about less than a minute per button. We wrote up a detailed instruction blog post here: https://www.rhythmo.io/post/sticky-button-fix

Anyways, lot of reading, but that's just how complicated the situation is. I totally understand the anxiety in our backer base, afterall it wouldn't be anything new for a Kickstarter company to just take all the cash and vanish in thin air. We can promise you that is definitely not us - I mean, there's really no more money left to take since we already manufactured the product, which all-in-all took way more capital than what we raised on Kickstarter, and I'm sure you have already seen lots of backers with their BeatBoxes in hand by now. The only goal for this Kickstarter campaign was to bring the project, something that I've been envisioning for years, to life, and hopefully the profits will follow later. We couldn't have done this without your support, and we'll definitely deliver what we initially promised on - it's honestly just a lot more complicated of a journey than we initially thought it'd be.

Long Awaited International Shipping Update
over 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 11:31:06 PM

I know I know - we've disappeared on Kickstarter and Indiegogo for a few weeks. A lot of it has to do with em, there not being much good news to report. We usually wait until we have some concrete news to update you with, and even then a lot of times the information we give you don't end up being very accurate, and every time we give you incomplete information you just get more confused and have more questions that we don't have answers for. Anyways, we now have a way clearer idea of what's going on, so here it is:

TLDR, we are starting some international shipments next week.

First of all, at least 95% of US orders should have been shipped out. We've shipped out over 800 units and we are really happy to see a lot of you already incorporating the BeatBox in your creative process on social media, and a few people even modified the BeatBox and came up with their own crazy wacky chassis for the parts. It means a lot to us that something we created is out there being utilized by people to help their creative journey. That being said, when we created batch shipping labels on UPS, there were a few that errored out and it's possible that we didn't catch a few of them, so if you are in the US and haven't gotten your BeatBox, hit us up on the contact us section on our website.

Backers in Hawaii and Alaska - we found out that USPS actually treats these areas as domestic so they allow batteries to be shipped out. That being said we are not EXACTLY sure if they would - we've had some pretty bad experiences shipping prototype units overseas using USPS before and they get destroyed by customs very often. Last week we shipped one unit out to Hawaii to see if it makes it there without being opened, if it does, we'll ship the rest of them promptly.

International orders - as our past updates stated, we talked to this logistics company in Hong Kong. Back in January they gave us quotes for all the shipments, and let's just say that it was pretty ridiculous. A lot of it has to do with international shipping getting really backed up, but some of the quotes actually exceeded the total we charged from you. I'm talking over $100. That's just not something we can even do. Another issue is from shipping all these units in the US, we noticed that about 5% of units are somewhat defective. This is something we didn't quite foresee: we thought the DIY thing is clever on the production perspective, but we didn't realize that it would make a huge packing list. I mean, 24 buttons, 30 cables, multiple PCBs, it was really easy for something to be missing or defective, mostly in missing cables or sticky buttons. We have been handling this domestically by just send out the missing parts to customers, but if we do this internationally it'd cost us an arm and a leg easily.

Anyways, we started talking to DHL about shipping these ourselves, and as it turns out having all the units shipped to us first and have us ship them directly to you via DHL is a lot cheaper. Plus this way we can do another layer of quality control - we have been taking apart every unit to check the number of all the cables and buttons to make sure there's nothing missing or defective. 

We submitted the Dangerous Goods registration information to DHL last week, and we should be getting a word back from them later this week. Once we do, we'll be able to start shipping. This applies to Canadian backers as well.

Now with that said, last December when we got the shipment in, we only had enough Bubblegum and Technics colorways for our US backers since the production of those units was delayed. The rest was supposed to get to us in January but that shipment has been delayed 2 separate times, and now we are getting them along with the international inventory in April. We are going to begin with shipping OG units out first since we have those in stock. Since we have added a whole quality control process in packing, shipping these units will be a bit slower than before with the US orders. We can only handle shipping out about 100 units a week with these conditions, but those will be 100 solid functional units.

Regarding Android users, we fixed the issue by updating the firmware. You can either do this yourself at home with an AVR programmer or an Arduino, or you can submit a recall request at https://forms.gle/4q7dqeZnjXoUaeZ87 and we'll send you a shipping label to get the board back to us. We have also sent out Android beta testing invites to everybody that signed up for it on our website. The Android version somehow crashes less than the iOS version, but it's got a whole other set of quirks.

Lastly, we are going to move most operation to our website, https://www.rhythmo.io/ .  From now on, we'll be posting updates in our blog section and if you have any questions, please reach out to us on our website's contact us section. We are a lot more responsive there. Anyways, sorry for this huge essay but as you can see the situation isn't exactly the most straight forward, and we wanted you to have all the details.