Mon Jun 17 '19 Announcement
almost 7 years ago
– Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 10:57:30 AM
Hi backers!
It’s been some time since our last update, and there are a few things that we have been meaning to get back to everyone on. This will be a longer update but we promise there is a lot of good information and rewards here!
First of all, thank you so much for joining us on this journey! We began this a year and a half ago with little more than a concept. An idea to use design & technology to help people access better drinking water in a more sustainable way. You helped us along the way to make the LARQ Bottle a reality even if there were some bumps along the way. We really could not have done any of this without your support, feedback, patience and generosity. Reading comments like this one form Nishikanta makes us smile:
Or this review from Dominque:
We believe in our mission more than ever from the feedback that we have gathered throughout this process. The LARQ Bottle has helped tens of thousands of people access cleaner and more sustainable drinking water and that is not a small achievement!
What have we learned
With that said, with the good we also want to acknowledge all of the challenges and learnings we’ve had along the way (and believe me there were plenty of those)! Our backers gave us encouragement and kept us honest throughout. Here are the top 3 things we have learned and have made an effort to improve:
We were (and are) optimists. I think it takes an optimistic team to take a product from a simple concept to market. However, I do have to admit we were overly optimistic with our delivery timeline. This is a learning for any of our future campaigns we’ll need to budget plenty of time for delays, shipping, quality and iterations on design. I apologize to our backers who needed this for a trip or an event and experienced delays in receiving the product. We’ll be better.
We should’ve staffed up to handle our inbound inquiries more quickly post-holiday. We were overwhelmed by the demand from the holiday season and as a result did not respond in a timely and professional manner to many of the inquiries we received. That is on us as a team. But I am happy to announce that our response time for any new emails are typically under 24 hours now. Regardless, none of you should’ve waited weeks for response, and for that we thank you for your patience.
Even with the pressure to ship, we should’ve taken more time and greater measures for quality assessment. This is especially true for any version 1.0 of any product. We were able to address the red light issues eventually but even a 5% issue can be a huge (and unacceptable) number when you are shipping 25,000 products across the world. While the red light issue is now fully solved, it was something that should’ve been avoided on our front. The red light now functions normally as a troubleshooting indicator.
We need to be better for our backers and our mission going forward. You have helped us to identify what we needed to work on and I promise we will continue to improve and deliver moving forward.
Where we are now?
On the shipment front we are 99.9% done with all of the orders. There are still a handful of orders that we don’t have the delivery information for or have bounced back for whatever reason. If you are one of those orders please email us at [email protected] to get this resolved - we want to get you your LARQ Bottle!
We still get some cases of red lights popping up from the older inventory. If you have an older bottle that does not have a red light, there is nothing to worry about. However, if you currently have a red light issue, we are addressing this in one of 2 ways:
shipping a new replacement cap or bottle if it is within an area that we can deliver to reliably
offering a full refund.
Regardless, the new inventory shipped does not have this issue and the red light mechanism functions normally. As with any warranty claims please proceed to https://www.livelarq.com/warranty-claim/. The bottom line is, even with the previously delayed response we are making an effort to make sure every backer gets a fully functional bottle or gets a full refund.
We are now able to ship to a few more countries outside of the U.S.
These are available through US site livelarq.com Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Norway, Korea, Japan, Taiwan
The Perks
I know there are a lot of backers that had to get a refund or wanted to purchase additional bottles but couldn’t. We want to offer a backer-only price for a limited time for those of you that wanted to pick up additional units. I know a lot of our backers have reached out to us regarding this topic.
For a limited time, you can use the code “BACKER35” at check out to take 35% off at checkout. This will expire by6/30 as we want to keep this code only to backers.
As I mentioned before we want to continue to reward our backers for being so supportive throughout the process. We’ll be announcing a unique perk for all future product launches including exclusive access and special offers. We’ll also be checking in periodically quarterly to give backers exclusive perks and gifts
Where are we headed?
As we have always said, this is just the beginning. We knew this was going to be a journey when we asked you to join us on this adventure. From product design input to helping us through logistical issues, you have been there for us every step of the way. For that - we can’t thank you enough.
We have much more planned for the future. We hope to bring LARQ to more countries this year so more people can have access to the product. We also have other products planned for later this year with the goal of giving more people access to pristine drinking water in a sustainable manner. We hope you will continue to join us on this adventure.
Drink brilliantly,
Justin & the LARQ team
Thu Apr 4 '19 Announcement
almost 7 years ago
– Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 04:40:26 PM
Hello backers,
Thank you all for your support! We want to provide an update and help address any issues that may have come up.
If you have reached out to us to [email protected], we are not ignoring you! We are still working through tickets in the order that they were received. If you have already submitted a ticket our goal is to resolve all open items in the next 2-3 weeks.
Apologies for the slow response on some of these requests, but we promise we are resolving every issue. We appreciate all the great feedback and will be making updates and improvements to the product that will be rolled out in the future.
Please see below on the next steps if you have any issues.
For warranty
If you have any issues with the product, please go to https://www.livelarq.com/warranty-claim/ To optimize your response time and issue resolution, please be sure to fill out all fields to the best of your ability.
Perk undelivered
Please email [email protected] from your Indiegogo email and include your most up-to-date delivery address. If this is your situation, we are very sorry and will be doing our best to get you your perk as soon as possible.
Drink brilliantly,
The LARQ Team
Fri Dec 14 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 02:59:23 PM
Hi backers! As promised we are giving shipping updates every couple of weeks. Here is the latest status by region.
US orders are complete - looks like there are some of you that have not filled out the survey so please do so, so that we can get your bottles to you. You can login to Backerkit to do so.
EU DDU - Asendia is still giving us issues but looks like more and more of you are receiving your packages. Hang in there for those of you that have not received them. There seems to be a number of packages that need to be picked up at the local post office so please check with your local post office in case your package is waiting for you there!
Canadian orders - there was a hold up with the sleeves and our Himalayan pink bottles in transit and through customs. We will be shipping out the remaining Canadian orders early next week. We'll be using Fedex instead of Canada Post this time to try to get it to you before the holiday
EU DDP - We have started processing our DDP orders out of our UK warehouse and anticipate having most, if not all, completed by mid to end of next week.
Other regions: we have processed all New Zealand, Singapore orders, and about 50% of Australian orders. Japan and HK - customs clearance seems to be smooth so we will be moving to fulfill all orders next week. Taiwan Customs clearance seems to be lagging we are reaching out to our shipping partners to understand why. Rest of the world we are releasing orders based on experience with the shipping process as well.
Our goal is to be >90% complete with all of our outstanding orders by end of next week. The remaining orders we will need some additional time to sort through each regional issues as they arise but hopefully we will be 100% pretty soon here as well.
We are a bit slammed during this period so please be patient with us reaching out to [email protected]. We really get back to everyone but maybe not quiet in real time :)
Thanks for your support an patience during this last year. I know the whole LARQ team has learned a lot from you all. I hope everyone is spending some extra time with family and friends during this holiday season.
Regards,
Justin
Tue Nov 6 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Tue, Nov 06, 2018 at 04:42:14 PM
Hi everyone!
We wanted to give a more formal update after providing updates via the comments section over the last couple weeks. Thank you all for your continued support, I know it’s been a journey and we couldn’t be doing any of this without your continued support.
Shipping
- We’ve completed 100% of our US orders - judging by the tracking, most of you should’ve received the products. A small percentage looks like it is still in transit but all backers should’ve received a tracking number
- We started shipping international orders last week and will continue to ramp up this week. Last week we shipped about [600 bottles] to Canada, EU (DDU), UK
- This week we plan on ramping shipments to the regions above and also do ~50 test orders each to Australia/NZ, Singapore, HK. Goal for this week will be to ship out another [1,500-2,000] bottles, and we aim to keep shipments at a 2k per week rate after that
- We are on track to finish shipments of most international orders by end of November and wrap up in early December
- We are taking your advice and will continue to give more quantitative updates every couple weeks
- We had some overly optimistic timelines initially but our estimate from the last update is still valid and we are getting better at forecasting deliveries
Rewards update
- We mentioned last time that we want to continue to reward our backers well into the future. We will continue to provide exclusive offers, pricing and reward to our backers on an ongoing basis
- For the first reward we’ll be providing a $25 credit to all backers on future orders once we have fulfilled your initial crowdfunding order. We’ll deliver the details of this by email after the initial order has been delivered successfully - this is to ensure we are rewarding the backers that have stuck with us throughout this journey. The reward will be available once we wrap up the kickstarter fulfillment in each region and are setup for ecommerce fulfillment
- In the future we’ll continue to offer rewards and incentives on a quarterly basis that are exclusive to backers
A few requests to help us be the best!
- Please reach out via [email protected] rather than the comments sections. We work through those requests systematically and will be a much better way to communicate with us versus the comments section. Please do allow up to a couple days for us to respond as we are working through a number of requests daily
- Please help us be more efficient by keeping the above schedule in mind before requesting an update on your specific shipment, it would really help us focus on getting more products out the door for our backers. Thank you!
- Finally, if you have a red light issue please refer to the last update regarding the red light issue on how best to reach out to us (much more efficient via [email protected])
Thank you so much for your support. Both the encouragement and feedback from this community is what keeps us going on a daily basis. We are making great progress and I can assure you the team is working extremely hard to get bottles out on a daily basis.
From all of the LARQ team - thank you.
Justin
P.S. - for our friends in the U.S. hope you had a chance to exercise your democratic voice today by voting! Happy election day.
Tue Oct 2 '18 Announcement
over 7 years ago
– Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 06:13:42 PM
TL;DR
- We have shipped over 5,000 units to our backers so far!
- We anticipate completing 90% of US orders in the next 2 weeks, although there may be some color combinations that will bleed over until week 3 when we have the correct inventory to fulfil them.
- In mid-October we will start shipping to Canada and DDU backers.
- At the end of October/early November will begin the rest of the international orders through the remainder of the year.
- We believe that most, if not all, orders will be shipped by the end of November but delivery could be extended through mid-December/end of the year based on your country of residence and the varying tax and import laws in place.
- We have continued to ramp production, whereas when we started shipping we were able to send a few hundred units a week, we are now sending between 1,000-1,500 units. We anticipate continuing to ramp to ~4,000 units a week by the end of October.
- We do apologize that the timeline has been moved around in the last few months. We have improved in being more realistic with our timeline, and acknowledge that we may have been overly optimistic with our earlier projections.
- We thank you for your patience! We will be announcing a special reward for all our backers in our next update as a token of our appreciation for your support - so stay tuned!
For backers that have already received your bottles, we appreciate all your kind words and feedback and for the backers still waiting, we truly appreciate your patience and support.
