Knops are acoustic adjustable hearing solutions that reduce noise in four steps. No electronics, comfortable to use and easy to carry.
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Dear backers,
Welcome to our first message of the year, a promising year for Knops. We want to take this opportunity to wish you all the best for 2018! Knops feels blessed to have you on board as our backers and supporters. We have a lot of exciting (visual) news to share with you.
As you can see our final prototypes have arrived. So what now? Well, we are busy checking all the specs and details. What we mean by this is that we are preparing the molds for production as making adjustments to the molds is very detailed work. Furthermore, we have started assembling some parts to see if they all fit perfectly. Also, from these samples, we have started testing them in different acoustic levels to see how they perform. We have now started tuning some of the assembling machines and are almost ready to start full production. Yep, a lot is going on!
As shown above, we received our production samples. But, what is the first impression? Well, the quality of these first samples is better than expected. When making a product using molds you can calculate and anticipate a lot of things, but you have to iterate to create that golden sample. So we’re really happy that these first samples are already of high-quality, and have started with fine tuning right away to be able to produce a perfect sample as soon as possible.
This is the final stage of Knops, the fine-tuning of all these different parts until everything is set to perfect levels. You could compare this to tuning the strings of a guitar until they sound just right. This fine-tuning consists of altering the molds accurately with tiny steps. We use these very accurate machines to make these tiny adjustments to the molds. See the image of one of the machines above.
As mentioned in a previous update, we were looking into the possibilities to scale up production as soon as possible. Once we produced the first batch of products and we are satisfied with the result and quality we ready to scale up production. This will enable us to ship way faster, also to our backers in the second batch.
We are still on track to ship the first orders by the end of this month. We will share an extended delivery schedule very soon, so you know when to expect your order!
Thank you all for your patience until now, we’re very grateful for this. We understand that you are excited to receive your pair of Knops and we can ensure you that our new product will be worth the wait. The whole team is looking forward to start shipping. We are working around the clock to arrange and produce everything as fast as possible, we’re almost there.
We’ll keep you all posted and share a new update next week!
Much love,
Team Knops
Time flies when we are having fun! We are already two weeks into December, and we have made a lot of progress.
This week we finalized the design of the packaging and the user manual. We are very happy with how this turned out and we will be sending everything to our printing company today. This company will produce the packaging and user manual for Knops.
We are setting up high-quality test equipment for quality control and expect to have this 100% functional next week. In quality control, it’s quite common to test products sample-wise. But for the first production batch, we’re going to test every single pair of Knops for every different setting. In this critical first stage of production, we want to make sure that all products are fully functional in order to provide everyone with a high-quality premium product.
In the last update, we told you that we were exploring options to scale the production capacity. In order to do this, we have to purchase an extra ultrasonic welding machine. We expect to have good news about this next week. If so, it’s easier to set up the delivery schedule, so we can be clear about when you can expect your pair of Knops.
We understand that you are all waiting for a definite date as to when your pair of Knops will be delivered. For now, it is still difficult to give you an exact date. This because the whole process of testing and perfecting your pair of Knops is a very detailed engineering part of the pre-production and also depends on the feedback that comes out of these testing phases. The test results of our samples from the first batch will give us feedback whether or not that batch is 100% perfect. Then we might have to finetune, and retest, re-adjust etcetera.
It could be that the first batch is almost perfect. However, there is always a possibility for things to arise. That is why the entire engineering team is going to be onsite during the production batches, to ensure a quick response time to any possible test feedback that might indicate a necessary last fine tuning. We expect to ship the first orders in January.
We are telling you this to be as clear and transparent as possible, and hope you understand why we are still a bit vague on when we will be delivering your pair of Knops to you.
As promised in a previous update, here is part 3 of the interview with Arjen and Richard. This time they share some insights into making a brand new product. In case you missed the earlier parts, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here.
Much love,
Team Knops
Hi backers,
A short update this time.
In the previous update, we promised to share a delivery schedule so that you know when to expect your pair of Knops. Together with our production partner, we’re still exploring options to scale the production capacity. This means that we are still working on the delivery schedule. We’ll share this schedule once we receive the required information from our production partner.
If we’re able to scale quickly, this will have a big (positive) influence on the delivery schedule. Meaning that we can ship all orders in a shorter time span. Fingers crossed!
Much love,
Team Knops
Hi backers,
December is going to be a very busy month for us. All the different aspects of launching a new product are coming together. Fulfillment, packaging, shipping, producing and testing the product. All these tasks are now in the final stage and are going to be finalized in December.
Richard and Arjen are already working closely together with our production company. The coming month they will be present at the production company, full time! Together they’re going to make sure that the fine-tuning phase runs as smooth as possible. This contains the test procedures and the assembly process. We will tell you more about this in future updates.
By the way, we interviewed Arjen and Richard about Dutch design and the production of Knops. They shared their view on design and production. You can read the first part about Dutch Design here and the second part on the production here. Part 3 is on the way and will be about the background of Arjen and Richard and the birth of Knops. We will share that interview with you in one of our coming updates.
Next week we will share a delivery schedule so that you know when to expect your pair of Knops. For now, have a nice weekend!
Much love,
Team Knops