Chris G wrote:
Not to be negative as I wish you the best of luck but it seems like this process is taking forever. In hindsight do you wish that you had waited until you were further along in the process before you made it all public?
Actually no. When we made this public we were on track to go into full scale production. It was impossible for us to know that our factory was going to... for lack of better terms... screw us. We lost a ton of money and our molds were useless to other factories. We were forced to start over.
In the end we are going to have a much better product. Our followers have thanked us time and time again for being open and honest. The majority of them have enjoyed following our journey.
You've said our process is taking forever. Do you know what the process is? We are not simply placing our sticker on an open molded product. We have designed our fairing shapes from scratch. This took months of CFD testing followed by wind tunnel testing. We then had to select all of our components, find a list of factories, go through the design phase with each factory, create customer fairing molds, build prototypes, test the prototypes, re-design, re-prototype, re-design, re-prototype... oops there goes our factory... start over finding a new factory, go through the whole process again.
I know from the outside it's easy to say those guys are taking forever, but if you saw the process from my shoes I'm sure you'd think differently.
Could we have released the news at a better time? Maybe, but I think it would be hard to determine that time. All I know is that I've made a ton of friends in the process of starting this company/releasing the news and we now have a few thousand people signed up for the pre-order.
Finally, we wanted the community to be a part of our design process. We wanted the community to give us their suggestions, so they felt they had a hand in producing a product they they liked. Because of the community there have been many changes to our final product...
To name a few:
A new logo
Black rims
Improved skewers
etc.
I think in the end this will all work out. Our followers and future customers who purchase our products will receive better products as a result of our "process" even if it has taken "forever".
Chris Thornham
Co-Founder And Previous Owner Of FLO Cycling