Hey Backers,

This backer update is just for INTERNATIONAL BACKERS who have noticed a delay in their shipment.

We apologize.

First, we apologize for this delay. We went over our international shipping budget because we failed to calculate and collect enough from backers. This is rare, but it does happen. Since our last update, we were able to ship out approx. 50 out of 108 INTERNATIONAL packages. Currently, there are a handful of you who we are asking for your continued patience, as we are working on getting these out.

The good news is we were able to re-allocated funds to our international shipping account and we will resume the international shipments throughout the rest of the month.

If you have not received your package yet, please hang tight. We have always delivered on all of our previous projects, albeit we do hit delays such as this one. But just know, we will get to your package out.

What we've learned...

As experienced as we are in running crowdfunding campaigns, we are still learning. We don't know everything but we are definitely going to be more careful when it comes to international shipping fees in the future; We noticed fees increase every year, sometimes twice a year. So when we set up shipping fees at campaign launch, we fail to factor in that prices may increase by the time we move into the shipping phase (which could be 3 to 6 months later sometimes more). Since we are coming to BackerKit Crowdfunding with a product that doesn't yet exist, it sometimes takes months for mass production and by then, prices have increased and our budget is no longer accurate. But, we will learn from this.

We apologize again to those of your who are having to wait longer but your patience and understanding is greatly appreciated. 🙏

Thank you so much, we will be back soon!

Hey Backers,

Just a heads up we have finished shipping out all of the USA backers, this is for those who have completed their BackerKit Survey. There are a few stragglers but we understand they will come in eventually and over time. We will periodically check on those and send out reminder emails.

We are now working on the international backer shipments, these only account for about 108 backers out of 302 total backers and requires a bit more processing as we work with an international consolidator for these shipments.

This will take us approx. 1-2 weeks to complete. =)

We thank you again for your pledge and support and we will be back again soon with a final update.

If you have not received a tracking number by email yet, you may need to complete your BackerKit Survey:

Please visit:

https://epicforged-pocket-edc-organizer.backerkit.com/ and enter in your Kickstarter email to begin the survey. 

You will provide us your shipping address, choose optional ADD-ONS to ship along with your reward, and pay for applicable shipping fees.

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

Just wanted to let you know we started to ship orders today!

We shipped the first batch of USPS Priority Mail backers and UPS Ground orders. Those will be arriving really soon! If you receive yours over the next couple of days, please share your thoughts on the organizers with us. If you have photos of you using them with all your EDC gear inside, please share those with the community and on Instagram and be sure to tag us #dapperdesignedc

There were actually two bags like the one above that was dropped off today to our local post office, in addition to half a bag of UPS boxes/packages that went to the local UPS Store.

We will be continuing to ship out packages every day until all is shipped.

We will be back when there is more news to share.

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

We have received the Pocket EDC organizers 📦 (20 large boxes in total) and are now moving into the shipping phase of the project!

Shout out to FedEx for handling the final mile delivery.

We have just sent the "48 hour shipping address" notifications from the BackerKit Survey, if you need to update/change your shipping address, please do so by answering the email before Monday. If you do not need to update your shipping address, you do not need to do anything as your survey will automatically lock in 48 hours (Monday).

Once the surveys have been locked, we will be importing in orders to our shipstation software in preparation for printing shipping labels. Since we only have 300-400 packages to ship, this should be fairly quick if we can get in an extra set of helping hands. But, as of right now it looks like a one man show so we are asking backers to please be patient with us.

Note: If you upgraded your shipping to USPS Priority Mail or UPS Ground, those will be shipping out first.

International backers, we ship via a different process and requires a bit of extra time compared to our USA backers. Please bear with us. 🙏

We will be back again Monday with another status update.

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

Just giving everyone an update regarding the vessel/cargo ship that has the EDC Organizers...

It has reached the California coast! It is now just about a day or two from docking at the Los Angeles Port. Per our last backer update, we hope to get more information and a timeline when we actually deliver rewards in a few days.

That's all for now. We will be back again soon!

Thanks!

Hey Backers,

We just received the vessel (container ship) information that your EDC organizers are on!

The vessel name is YM UNANIMITY and it is a Taiwan container ship and you can track it yourself on www.vesselfinder.com and/or www.marinetraffic.com

We do not have a subscription to these websites to get more detailed information but if any backers do, please feel free to share with the community.

It appears it is scheduled to dock at the Los Angeles Port (USLAX) on March 2nd. This is about 10 days from today! We initially thought it would dock at Long Beach Port but no big difference, the two ports are actually bordering one another.

It might take a few days from port to our home office and then we can begin reward fulfillment soon after. We will be back with another update as soon as they arrive.

Thank you for your continued patience!

Hey Backers,

Just wanted to let you know that the 13-in-1 Multitool Carabiner ADD-ON that was available for purchase on the BackerKit Survey have arrived a bit earlier than we expected!

We wanted to show some photos of them and also share that we immediately found a use for them today while assembling a new spinning chair toy for our little one.

That's all for now! As soon as the organizers arrive, we will be back with another backer update!

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

We finally got some photos of the final mass production organizers (the ones you're going to receive). These are the final photos before they are packaged individually into simple plastic bags (Please Note: Our factory uses recyclable packaging that minimizes waste and ensures damage-free delivery) and then into cardboard boxes (also recyclable) and then placed onto a cargo ship. We received these photos last night with confirmation that they are being loaded onto a shared container today, to make its way to our port (Long Beach Port). We are fortunate that our home office is also in Long Beach which should save a little bit of time once it docks.

Our rep said the pink, purple, gray, khaki, and black bags have already been packaged up which is why there aren't photos of those at this time.

The entire trip from port-to-port takes approx. 4 weeks. Which means we get to move into the reward shipping phase of the project as soon as they arrive to us.

We hope to get some more information about the actual container ship they will be on and we will share it when we can.

We will be back as soon as we have more news to share. Thank you for your continued patience! 

Hey Backers,

We finally got a more concrete ETA from our manufacturing partner! This was the main reason why we haven't been updating sooner. We simply didn't have an official timeline from our rep and didn't feel confident in posting anything until we did. They stressed to us they have been really busy since the holidays and they are also approaching Lunar New Years season as well. This manufacturer partners with many other brands (some of these brands you may be familiar with, but that's neither here nor there) so we can imagine how backed up they have been. We understand they are working to their best capacity and we are confident that they will achieve the ETA below...

Mass production will be finished this week and by January 26th, they will be packaged up into cartons and prepared for ocean freight. Ocean freight takes 3 to 4 weeks and when they arrive we will be moving quickly into reward fulfillment.

We hope to have photos of the mass production phase and share them with you as soon as our rep provides them to us.

Limited Edition Orange EDC Organizer

In the last backer update, we mentioned a limited edition ORANGE EDC ORGANIZER. We now have them available for pre-order on our website:

https://dapperdesign.com/products/orange-edc-pocket-organizer-pre-order-estimated-for-march-2024

If you pre-order, please use Coupon Code: BACKERKIT which will give you FREE SHIPPING and also let us know you want it to ship along with your pledge reward.

We thank you for your continued patience and we hope to have more good news to share soon.

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

On our Pocket EDC Organizer campaign on Kickstarter, backers have requested a bright orange color. We talked with our manufacturing partner and they said they can accommodate a smaller order but at a slightly higher manufacturing cost.

We already locked down ADD-ONS for everyone on here but we can request the BackerKit team to UNLOCK it temporarily to allow you to purchase it as an ADD-ON to your existing reward. HOWEVER, there are a few caveats with this...

1) If you decide to purchase the ORANGE organizer ADD-ON, it may delay your original shipment (approx. 1 month) as those organizers are being produced later.

2) The Orange organizer is an ADD-ON for $20 and can only be purchased as an ADD-ON.

Here is a photoshopped image of what it can look like:

The orange is going to be close to this but not exact. This was not a material color that the manufacturing partner had readily available. They had to source it out.

Would anyone be interested to hop on to this ADD-ON?

Alternatively, we may put it up on our website as a PRE-ORDER and then offer a coupon code that gets you FREE SHIPPING (so you don't have to pay shipping again) which means we will ship it together with your reward when it is time.

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

We understand that not everyone may celebrate but we hope you're doing well anyways!

Just wanted to check in to say we haven't forgotten about you. We wanted to give a quick update that our manufacturing partners are still working on the organizers. This is their busiest season and to be frank, they haven't exactly treated us with the upmost priority since giving them a much smaller mass production order than we promised/estimated before launching. However, this doesn't mean they aren't going to deliver an exceptional organizer for us!

At this time, we are playing the waiting game to see when they can give us a better and more concrete ETA so that we can estimate when we can actually move into the reward delivery phase. We hope to get something from them soon.

We launched a 2nd round of funding on Kickstarter

Many of you may have noticed we are currently running the same project on Kickstarter (but shipping rates have increased across all carriers so everyone here got a savings shipping fees! Plus, you will receive organizers most likely 1 to 2 months in advance).

So why did we go to Kickstarter? For some reason, a lot of our previous backers did not pledge on this project while it was live on BackerKit (this is evident as we raised and surpassed the same amount of backers and pledge amount in just a few days than we did in the full 30 days here). Going into the decision, we weren't sure but we had to find out. Reason 1) we wanted to see if we could get more funding (as a small family business, projects are our livelihood and we do it not only because we love it, but just like everyone else we need it to pay bills and survive), 2) accommodate backers who we think wanted to pledge on the organizer but only if it was on Kickstarter (we see now this was a case to be made), 3) to compare the two platforms for our own personal knowledge and company growth. 4) To grow and maintain the relationship with our manufacturing partners with a commitment to a 2nd order with them.

It is for these reasons among some others that we launched on Kickstarter.

With that said, we are glad we experienced both platforms running the same product, we have learned a lot and each platform has it's pros and cons. We believe BackerKit Crowdfunding is awesome and it certainly has it's place in the crowdfunding industry. Both platforms can certainly learn from eachother too which ultimately makes a better experience for backers.

Personal news

Typically, we try to keep our personal lives outside of work but sometimes it is necessary to help understand that we are just like you and we have struggles just as everyone else. We wanted to let everyone know we have had a family medical emergency over the last weeks. Aaron's mom had a stroke last year and she hasn't been very well since, its hard for her to get around and she recently had a fall and ended up in ER last week. She is better now from the fall but has developed a fever and is in the hospital with level 2 Sepsis. Apparently, an infection developed through the injuries on her face and head. We are still waiting to see her status from the doctor.

Please note, none of this is going to directly delay the manufacturing partner from working on the organizers but it may mean we are not as available to answer comments/questions as quickly as we hope.

We thank you in advance for your thoughts and prayers.

We will be back again as soon when we have good news to share. We thank you for your continued patience!

Hey Backers,

Just a quick update to let you know 87% of backers have completed their surveys. This leaves approx. 38 backers who have not yet completed it. Ideally, we'd like to see 90% or more to have a more accurate count of ADD-ONS and organizers to manufacture, but it is close enough.

Locking-down ADD-ONS and charging cards

Although we still have some stragglers, we will go ahead and LOCK-DOWN ADD-ONS and charge stored credit cards for those completed surveys. That way, we can send the funds/deposit and the current production quantity estimations to our manufacturing partners to start mass production ASAP.

Note: Locking down ADD-ONS is different from Locking down Shipping Addresses. We will notify backers of this as we get closer to actually shipping rewards to allow backers to update shipping addresses in the event that you move or change addresses. Of course, we will continue to keep everyone updated through backer updates.

Please be advised you will see a charge on your credit card today from either "Dapper Design" or "EpicForged". Just know that it is for this project.

Thank you!

Hey Backers,

We are just about ready to send out invitations to the BackerKit Survey. This is where you will be able to confirm your rewards, provide us your shipping address (you will have a chance to update or change this again at the 48 hours before we actually begin shipping rewards), browse optional ADD-ONS, and pay for shipping fees (based on your location/country). But first, we are running a smoke test!

We just emailed out survey invitations to a small randomized group of backers. Once these backers start to complete their survey and we see that there are no issues, we will then be back with an official backer update with instructions and invitations to everyone else.

It is recommended that we run this for 24 hours. If all is well we will be back tomorrow around this time to send the remaining. If you receive this invitation, please answer your survey just as you normally would, choose optional ADD-ONS, and pay for applicable shipping fees. If you notice something is wrong with your survey, or if you have any questions or concerns regarding the ADD-ONS, please leave a comment.

If you missed our campaign, you can still PRE-ORDER on the BackerKit Pre-Order store here: https://epicforged-pocket-edc-organizer.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Thank you!