Michael Hughes, my former manager (now an MOD) and the first person that I ran into the night I lost my iPad. He gave me a lot of support as well as assistance with info for people and places to contact. Thanks Michael!! Enjoy your tile!! #thetileapp (at Chicago O'Hare International Airport)
First, I want to assure you that we know you want your Tiles right away. Many of you have waited for close to a year for your Tile, and some people in the EU have waited even longer. This is not what we envisioned when we set out on our crowdfunding campaign a year ago. We want nothing more than to ship every Tile ever ordered tomorrow. We literally talk about the wait multiple times each day and it is the top priority for every employee at Tile.
If you ordered before August 15th, 2013, your Tiles are waiting for you. However, you must confirm your shipping address before we can mail them. If you have not already done so, or are unsure, you can click this link to resend it. If you don't see it in your inbox or spam, please email our Customer Success team at [email protected].
Second, let me give you an idea of where we are today. To date we have shipped over a quarter million Tiles, but we know we have to ship faster. We have worked hard with our manufacturing partner to develop a plan to increase production as quickly as possible. We track our manufacturing goals on a daily basis to ensure Tile production volume increases week by week as planned (see the current estimated ship schedule here). Unfortunately, there are challenges every day to maintain that plan as we hold our ourselves and manufacturing partners to a very high level of quality. (In addition, we standby Tile with a 1 year warranty and 30 day refund policy.)
Specifically, we have seen one major bottleneck in our manufacturing process. We designed Tile to be sleek and simple and that is symbolized in the beautiful white plastic case. It turns out that it is not easy to get a manufacturing line to produce such a precision part in huge quantities at the quality we want to provide. These parts are made using a process called plastic injection molding, and the tool required to produce them is custom made for Tile, is large, is very complicated and takes months to build each one. After our crowd funding campaign, we believed that just one of these tools would be sufficient for producing all of our Tiles.
After just a few weeks, it became abundantly clear that our lone tool would not be good enough. The only way to make larger quantities of Tiles is to build additional injection molding tools. As of two weeks ago, our second tool is up and running and we are producing more Tiles each week than we did the week before. In addition, that number will continue to increase as we have several more of these tools being built and will come online in the coming weeks.
I know that you’ve waited for a long time, and much longer than you or we anticipated. I apologize for that but feel confident that you’ll be delighted with the end product.
Finally, I speak for the entire Tile team when I say we appreciate your support and patience, and we know that we wouldn’t be here without you. The wait is almost over for everyone. If you haven't looked at what people are Tiling, take a look on Instagram and Twitter. #TiledIt
We know that it has been several weeks since our last update, so we wanted to tell you about our progress. We are now just several weeks away from shipping Tiles to our very first backers dating back to late June last year. There is so much involved in setting up the systems to ship to hundreds of thousands of people. And, we've been focused on making that process, and ultimately the experience for you, even better.
In addition, we have submitted our app to the Apple App Store for approval. It is typical for the process to take longer for apps that have hardware components, but we'll let you know once it is officially approved as well.
The app
We have not spoken much about the app so far, but you saw the prototype in the video. We've been hard at work building a phenomenal user experience and investing in areas as we've learned about what is and is not possible with the iPhone.
For the past month, we've been running usability studies with real users in a controlled environment to understand how people intuitively use Tile. One interesting tidbit that really surprised us was the difference between the way men and women look for their Tile using the app.
Months ago we started development of the application based on the functionality we envisioned in the video. When we first started, we began with hand written designs of what we wanted our users to experience when they used Tile. Across the bottom of the photo, you'll see the handwritten notes and sketches. Above those are the first designs of the for various pieces of the app to meet those initial sketches and requirements.
Fulfillment
Fulfillment is the term companies use when they're describing the process that takes place once they receive an order all the way to the customer receiving the product they ordered. This includes the warehouse that stores, packages, tracks, and ships the package. Setting up this system is no easy task, and Amazon is truly masterful at it.
At Tile, we've setup our own fulfillment systems with one of the best companies in the business. So, all of our orders that we will be shipping over the next few months will all come from one warehouse in the Los Angeles area.
All the Small Things (or Big)
Of course, there many other things that we've been working on as a company.
Packaging - Like Apple, we want you to have the very best out-of-box experience and that starts with the package. We've put a lot of effort into making that a great experience as well.
Website updates - We have been so focused on building a great product that we have really neglected our website. We are turning that around.
User research - In addition to usability testing of the app, we've spent a lot of time interviewing and polling the Tile community so that we can really understand you and how to make the product the very best for every Tiler.
Hiring - We are growing extremely quickly as a company and we cannot hire fast enough. We need great engineers of all kinds and it is extremely hard to find the right talent even in the heart of Silicon Valley. We've been spending a tremendous amount of time on this.
Building a great culture - Every great company has a well defined culture, and we are taking that very seriously at Tile. We are trying to build a community minded company that actively gives extraordinary value to our customers and the world at large.
Thanks for your incredible support. We cannot tell you how much we appreciate you backing our company, and cannot wait to ship you your Tile.
