CLYW Yeti Story …
We make the black Yetis … thinking oh yes these are going to be so easy to assemble since the prototypes were. Little did I know what 2000 plastic halves actually looked like.
So Charles and I give it a go. Sanding each half. Test assembling each half, matching them making sure everything goes smoothly … and we complete about 30 in one day.
Awful … something needs to change. That is when I start saying, OMG I just don’t have enough time to do this, I’m way over my head here. I love how I am being painted as a bad guy by deciding this.
Anyways …
During the same time our manufacturer is working on the coloured run. We get them to start sanding the halves and polishing them. The material works way better and it is so much easier to match halves. Charles and I finish about 100 in one day. We high 5! WOOO!
So now we have black halves sitting here and coloured halve sitting here … so which ones should I start on? Hmmmm … the ones that are easier and go smoother of course.
So we’ve decided to ship the black ones back to the manufacturer to sand them, and we probably won’t get them back until January. These ones are so hard to match halves though. So hopefully we can get at least half of them to go.
We’re dying here, at the end of the day after testing yetis our arms are burning, our hands ache. We wake up and start all over again … hoping that we grew some muscles in our palms or that the forearm ache doesn’t turn into tennis elbow.
It’s just two of us and we managed to assemble 440 Yetis over a week leading up to the release and now most of them are all gone. We’re feeling pretty good about that, like all of the hard work was worth it!
We priced these at a price that matched the play/quality, plus the amount of work that goes into them. Plus to do the coloured plastic it adds about $5-6 per Yeti for us compared to the black ones (which is probably more then it the costs per yoyo to make a mass produced plastic in China). It’s not like we just grab them off a shelf and put them together and toss it in a box. There is a lot of work that goes into these.
I guess I should end with, I’m sorry. Sorry for trying something different.
Chris
PS: To those that picked one up thank you so much we love you! To those that were expecting Black Yetis for so long and never got one, I’m sorry. Just had no other option.