Well, same story… CLYW site flipped the bird on me with the countdown timer stuck at 00s for a good minute.
Oh bother.
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Not a bad idea!
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One Drop have limited manufacturing capacity. The anodisers have limited anodising capacity. If they took pre-orders, then it’d just have to be capped at 50 units anyway. They can’t just go ‘hey Shawn and David, want to spend the next 6 months doing nothing but making yoyos for us?’!
A fairer yet still practical system would be for everyone to get a window of a few minutes to submit their payment & address details. Once those few minutes are up, 50 people will be randomly chosen & charged. If payment fails, then the person has a short time to correct the issue before someone else gets selected instead. This system would be more fair for the average person who stays up all night waiting for a drop; and it ruins the advantage of bots, as long as duplicate mailing addresses & similar trickery get filtered out, ideally by hand.
This is similar to the system that Valve is using for pre-ordering their new products, because they’re not being made fast enough and the demand is insanely high.
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IMO the pre-order lottery was probably the most accessible/manageable of all available options.
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“They can’t just go ‘hey Shawn and David, want to spend the next 6 months doing nothing but making yoyos for us?’!”
The issue isn’t Shawn and David personally—it’s the production capacity of the business. If I ran a manufacturing business, having six months of guaranteed orders would be a great position to be in. Framing it as “asking two people to spend six months making yoyos” makes it sound like a personal favour.
Sorry edited:
But I guess that is the charm of a boutique yoyo company, small runs and personalities that care about quality and the community. I was looking at it from a cold hard business aspect 
This is comparable to if you ran a screen printing business with your own T-shirt designs & brand; but also did some printing on the side for other brands, because the quality of your work is held in high regard. You need people to care about your brand for it to succeed; but if you depend so heavily on working for other brands, then people will just move on. And those brands will eventually leave you in the dirt, because they prefer to use cheap labour most of the time anyway, and you don’t own the designs that they were making you print.
6 months of ‘guaranteed work’ is not valuable to One Drop as a business—they already have as much ‘guaranteed work’ as they could ever want, selling their own successful products.
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That’s very true. At the end of the day this is one simple throwers opinion on a rather small issue.
They have got a business model that works incredibly well, compared to me, who doesn’t run a successful toy company. It’s works well for them and their life and work balance. Works well in regards to their capacity and the capacity of 3rd parties involved.
It’s works so well, I don’t see them failing at any point in the future too.
I wish them all the success and positive wellbeing in the world
Just wish there was a simple solution to bots, scalpers and 3am refreshing 
Ps, please reserve me a Summit 
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Unfortunately technological ossification (cough Shopify cough) kind of makes most potential solutions to this problem inconvenient to implement.
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The issue is really just that the planned future runs are even smaller. If you didn’t get one last night you are not getting one pretty much.
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This marketing ploy with forced scarcity is garbage for the customer and just serves to generate hype and fear of missing out. To those lucky few who landed one, congratulations. All this has done for me personally is to stay away from companies that do this. It’s not worth the frustration or the excitment
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i understand where you’re coming from and things like this have made me steer away from these brands. i just want to play yoyo, i don’t desire to collect and i don’t want to compete with collectors and scalpers. but i think the problem here isn’t a lack of ability, it’s a lack of desire. I’ve seen it said so many times even by david and steve, they’re just rolling along doing what they feel like. it’s more of a hobby and passion project than a way to make money. most businesses operate and market differently. they rise to meet the demand. clyw and od have made it pretty clear that they aren’t interested in doing things that way
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve missed a drop that sold out in the sub four minute range, and lost a lottery. I’ve missed as many drops as I’ve scored this year. That’s the nature of hundreds of people after the same thing. Y’all ever bought an MFD…it’s not for creatures that need blink.
In the dust of these high-value target drops, folks cry foul. It sucks to lose at anything. I know well. So do you. I don’t think it’s bots, that’s more trouble than you think. A lottery would be easier to cheat. A scalper or two may be in the mix, but even they missed. Creating scarcity would be more harmful to a small company in a small market than it would ever be worth. It’s just high demand coupled with low quantity. These little companies are doing their best, from the heart, and it’s better than if they didn’t bother at all. They don’t owe any of us anything.
I was wrapping up a weekly Zoom call when this drop went down. Myself, and one other in the call went for the Legacy Peak at the end of the call. So I got to watch two perspectives at two different map dots simultaneously. My friend hit zero, stuck there, kept refreshing, never saw “add to cart” before he saw “sold out”. I hit zero, stuck there, kept refreshing, refreshed “add to cart” because my left hand was moving faster than my right, tapped buttons without reading, payment spun…I got one. I was hesitant to say so out loud, as I am sure several others are. Because there is a lot of bitterness around this one. You win some, and lose the rest. That’s just life, and this was just one toy in a long line of them to come. And I still hate anyone had to feel bummed.
As always, congratulations to those that got the goods. If you didn’t, may it be you next time. #NoShelfQueens
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. I love you. —Cody
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I’m sure no one here is upset at anyone who scored one. Pretty sure the frustration comes down to how few and the lovely internet
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Of course they aren’t, my friend. That wasn’t the point.
I was responding to this
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I got that. Not from fear of hate, but fear of folks being slapped with “I got it” when they were already low. I like you cats.
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i think more people need to understand this and be realistic
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I’m excited to hear it was real and someone got one. I refreshed my little heart out to no avail. It seemed like a broken link on my side(the same happened with the blumi)
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Well that’s what I get for sleeping. Didn’t pay attention to the drop date/ time, completely missed this.
11 ish hours ago I think I was reading a book to my son for bed time. I’ll take it
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this is the thing that really gets me – they are fully aware of the unbelievable sky-high demand for this product. they just dont want to make any. (inb4 their business they can do what they want) even if a larger future run was a year (or more? lol) out at least it would quell the surge a bit but steve literally said “no plans, fight amongst yourselves”. i feel like theres no way to take that as not a snub to people who want a Peak. i kind of dont care how you view the “classic” models but it really seems like theres a willful disconnect between old clyw and new clyw and they do not want to fix it. leaving the majority of your fans to toss away their evening is stupid. i think a 40 place lottery would have been very easy to set up. my 2 cents
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