All North America Shipments complete; last 2.5% orders shipping this week
over 6 years ago
– Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 08:28:42 PM
Dear Foldscope Backers,
We hope you are all enjoying the holidays! As promised, here is another update with the latest on shipping… following up on last week update.
All of the last remaining orders for North America were shipped last week and should have already been delivered. We are still working with some of you to correct address issues, but hopefully everything else reached you safe and sound last week. This was a big task for us with ten’s of thousands of backers and hundreds of thousands of individual foldscope.
We recognize that our international shipping vendor has not provided good service and support to many of you, and we apologize for this. We have not worked with this vendor before, but they initially gave us an extremely positive impression and provided great service to our team in China. Unfortunately, they recently de-prioritized our orders relative to other customers and gave very slow responses to our concerns related to customs clearance, address issues, and neglected orders that should have shipped a long time ago. Based on your feedback, we have now fully migrated our shipments to a new vendor. We just confirmed with our new international shipping vendor that the last remaining 388 orders will ship to you within next few days, and the tracking info will be emailed to you upon shipping.
We will send another update once these last 2.5% of the your orders have shipped.
With international shipping, many of you have requested documents to be submitted to the customs office. Please send your emails to [email protected] if you need our help. It’s best to first call the customs office, request for exact need of documents and we will send them to you by email. We know this can be a difficult process, but every customs office is different and categorizes the units in different product caregories.
Finally, as many of you are opening Foldscope on Christmas eve, a reminder that video folding instructions are here: https://www.foldscope.com/foldscope-instructions
To join Foldscope community and share your explorations and mentor new micronauts; please sign-in with code included in the box: http://microcosmos.foldscope.com
As always, happy exploring fellow micronauts!
Our best,
The Foldscope Team
December update
over 6 years ago
– Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 12:40:38 AM
Dear Foldscope Backers,
With the holidays quickly approaching, we wanted to give you another update with the latest on shipping... with ups and downs over the last month; things are turning around.
The shipping container with all the remaining orders for North America arrived at the U.S. port as expected at the beginning of this month, but it was held at US customs for an unusually long time (they do not tell us why). Now, it has finally been delivered to our shipping partner in California and they have already started shipping them out. The remaining orders will ship early next week with delivery before Christmas.
Some shipments to locations outside North America have encountered delays due to issues with customs, and we have spent a lot of time and effort to contact those affected to get the additional information required. Also, our overseas shipping partner somehow missed some of the orders placed through Kickstarter, so those will be shipped out this coming week as well. We apologize for this error.
Finally, some orders had issues with the mailing addresses we received; if you receive an email message indicating this, please help us to resolve this as soon as possible.
To keep you all informed, we will send another update next week with further shipping updates.
We truly value everything you all have done for this project. Your patience and supportive messages at critical times have meant a lot to the Foldscope Team. As we move into the next year, we look forward to engaging you all in building a strong scientific community supporting curiosity-driven science.
Our best,
The Foldscope Team
85% of Kickstarter-pledged rewards have shipped!
over 6 years ago
– Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 07:52:24 PM
Dear Foldscope Backers,
We are happy to report that over 85% of Kickstarter-pledged rewards have shipped! The other 15% will ship within about one week.
For those of you who have already received your kits, we hope you are having a fantastic journey into the microcosmos! Please remember to share your findings and experiences with the global Foldscope community at microcosmos.foldscope.com. This is also the place for technical questions and sharing your ideas on how to bring science to everyone. Additionally, let us know if you have questions or concerns by emailing us at [email protected]. Please note that we don’t have enough staff to handle phone calls right now since we are all multi-tasking at the moment, but we will reply to all of your emails as quickly as we can.
For those of you that haven’t received your kits yet, thank you for your continued patience. Kickstarter-pledged rewards are all scheduled to ship out by end of next week. Most of the pre-orders will also ship out by then, except one last shipping container still needs to cross the ocean, so these units will ship by second week of December. Thankfully, all units will arrive in time for the holidays! We will make sure you get your tracking numbers as soon as possible once the orders ship.
Finally, for those of you that have expressed some frustration with shipment delays and the frequency of our updates, please accept our humble apologies. We would like to remind you that our team is fully invested in a long-term vision for this product. This campaign has not only been about producing 18 metric tons of products to fill and ship your orders to over 10,000 destinations in 115 countries; we built our own factory and established an infrastructure that we hope will provide the foundations for making these products for years to come. We are pushing ourselves to our limits to bring these units to you as quickly as we can, often working past midnight and through the weekends, sometimes to the detriment of personal health. We are so grateful that you helped us bring this vision to life, despite a few bumps in the road, through all your warm support.
Once again, many thanks for believing that our small team could make this happen, and for supporting our efforts to magnify curiosity worldwide! We hope you all will have curiosity-filled holidays.
Our best,
The Foldscope Team
Foldscope Video Instructions are here!
over 6 years ago
– Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 11:02:10 PM
Dear Foldscope backers,
We're happy to let you know that the video instructions are now available on our website!
Here is the link to our video instructions page:
https://www.foldscope.com/foldscope-instructions
We hope you find these instructions useful as more and more of you are beginning your journey into the microcosmos.
Keep exploring!
Foldscope Team
Several thousand Foldscope kits have shipped!
over 6 years ago
– Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 01:09:19 AM
Dear Foldscope backers,
Good news! We’re happy to report that several thousand Foldscope kits have shipped!
As the kits are shipped, we will be emailing you your tracking numbers; so please keep an eye out for an email from [email protected]. Also, note that we will be posting instructional videos on our website within the next couple of days, so please check there for further guidance on assembling and using your Foldscopes.
If you have not yet received an email yet regarding your shipment, please hang in there a little longer! We are still assembling the kits and coordinating shipments to over 100 countries, so some of them will take a few more weeks to arrive.
We want to thank you for your support and we’re so excited to share the wonders of the microcosmos with you and your community.
Best wishes,
The Foldscope Team
