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Looking back, we accomplished a lot in March. We're proud of the Bigscreen team for pulling off a monumental feat with international shipping. After several months of customs, shipping, and logistics delays, we've now successfully shipped to all worldwide countries. Today, we're back with another production update. TL;DR we expect to have completed shipping all remaining Bigscreen Beyond orders within the next 6-8 weeks.
Audio Strap Update
Bigscreen Beyond Audio Strap reviews are starting to come out! We recently started shipping Bigscreen Beyond to Japan, and Mogura covered this announcement. Additionally, Mogura visited our offices in San Francisco, Calif. and reviewed the Audio Strap and recommends it, praising the comfort and lightweight design.
We spent the past year quietly testing Audio Straps prototypes and early engineering samples. We received lots of helpful feedback from testers and implemented several improvements to the product. We began production earlier this year and have now shipped ~100 Audio Straps to customers in a small production batch.
Initial feedback has been great and we have been moving into mass production. It's still taking some time to ramp up production at the factory, so we don't have an exact delivery date just yet. Our best estimate currently is to ship all the Audio Straps in June.
Production Update
As March wraps up, we're excited to have completed nearly all international shipments for 2023 customers, including Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Only a few orders are left to ship, and this is typically due to waiting for prescription lens inserts or occasional inventory issues with certain IPDs. Ramping up international logistics of a custom-made product and shipping it worldwide from Los Angeles, Calif. was a significant undertaking that required the focus of the entire team. With that behind us, we've been focusing on completing the last remaining 2023 orders in the United States. Additionally, we have started shipping to customers that ordered in January-February 2024 if we have their IPD in stock. As always, we aim to ship in order but that's hard to guarantee as IPD inventory is constantly fluctuating on a week-by-week basis.
Compared to our previously announced estimates on March 1st, we're approximately 1-2 weeks behind schedule from our previously stated goal of completing 2023 USA preorders by the end of March. This is due to two factors: Chinese New Year and shipping delays. Production in our overseas factories halted in February as expected with the annual Chinese New Year holiday. However, it took 1-2 weeks longer than expected for our factories to resume production at full speed. Additionally, we experienced flight and customs delays in getting these parts shipped to our Los Angeles, Calif. factory.
We utilized this gap of time in February-March to ship all the Beyonds destined for international customers which were previously inventoried and set aside on pallets in Los Angeles.
With that complete and overseas production back on track, we still expect to finish shipping every remaining Bigscreen Beyond order for all worldwide customers from 2023-2024 within the next 6-8 weeks.
By June, we expect Beyond to ship within 2 weeks of placing an order. This is a dramatic improvement in production speed once the preorder backlog is completed.
Customer Support
The factors above also led to a shortage of parts for certain IPDs, which has unfortunately caused some people to wait several weeks to get their headset swapped to a different IPD. Our goal is to handle IPD swaps within 1-2 weeks. While we've achieved that in many cases, some people in certain IPDs have needed to wait 4+ weeks in February-March. We apologize for these delays and now that production is back on track after the holiday, we expect to handle RMAs (IPD swaps) quickly again.
Unlike the holiday season in December, our customer support team is now consistently responding to support tickets within 1-3 business days, and RMAs will only take 1-2 weeks.
Join the Bigscreen Beyond Discord
Over the past year, we've had a private Discord for Bigscreen Beyond customers. Thousands of happy customers are now sharing their experiences, reviews, and tips in the Discord. We're now excited to open the Discord to the public! If you're curious about Bigscreen Beyond, join the Discord: discord.gg/bigscreenbeyond
New Merch Drop
We're excited to launch several new Bigscreen t-shirts on the Bigscreen Store, including one featuring an exploded 3D CAD model of the Bigscreen Beyond.
