Creator Set | SerialBuilder | Pre-order update #14

Hey everyone! I hope you’re all doing well and whoever has started receiving their sets is having a great time building. Just a bit of housekeeping to start with…

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I’m assuming that the majority of Run #01 people have dropped off from these updates, so there’s no need to separate out the Run #01 / Run #02 updates, however, Neo Bikes is now a live campaign and so those updates will need to go somewhere. I’ve set up a new ‘section’ for those updates, so if you’re receiving the Neo Bikes updates, but don’t want to, you can head on over to your subscription and uncheck the Neo Bikes. Or you could stay subscribed and get a glimpse of the nonsense I’ll be spewing over there.

You’re probably wondering what the “Building EB Brick-by-Brick” thing is about and this was something I wanted to do back when I was clearly overly optimistic about the amount of time I had to put together these updates. I will still eventually get to them, and they’ll be more about building the business itself, rather than anything regarding the specific updates. Do keep an eye out for that if you’re interested in what goes on behind the scenes and how we’re using our learnings from our years of running startups to make this one better. I will get some of those posts out eventually.

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Let’s get to the updates!

Shipments

Batch 1

Most of the shipments besides the US have been OK and are making their way over and are on schedule. Here are the expected dates for arrival at the local port:
AU: Sep 28
EU: Oct 4
CA: Oct 5
GB: Oct 18
US: Oct 28 Nov 2

We’ve been informed that the US shipment just left the port and is estimated to land at the local port on Oct 28th Nov 2nd. This is later than we have stated on the website so it’s important to try to explain (as much as we’re able to anyway) why it’s taken so long to depart.

Our European customers who were part of Run #01 will remember a similar scenario with their shipment being delayed for over a month at the departing port. Back then we were dealing with severe port congestion issues due to some ongoing conflicts and general maritime mayhem. This time, we’re dealing with a few other issues, specifically regarding certification and the ever-changing requirements of shipping to the US. Our shipping partner found it quite difficult to secure a boat on which to send our shipment due to many refusing to take brick sets.

For now, we will monitor the shipment and see how long it’s delayed (it may even my some miracle arrive earlier than destined). At the moment, we’re expecting deliveries to start arriving by mid-November for US customers. If we are seriously delayed, you can trust that we will make it up to you guys somehow. For now, thank you for your patience, and hoping there are no further delays.

Batch 2

Much to our surprise, some of you from Batch 2 (which includes everyone from Batch 1 who ordered a Specter) have already started receiving your Specters. The irony is not lost on us and as you may have experienced when trying to build your Specters, we were completely unprepared for a scenario where they arrived earlier than the Batch 1 shipments.

We hadn’t even had a chance to publish the Specter instructions which left a few early recipients of the Specters a bit confused...sorry about that!

Thank you to everyone who has provided us with feedback on the builds and the instructions. I made a small update to the Specter instructions recently as there were a couple of bugs from our new instructions software (more on the later), but those should be fixed now.

How is it that Batch 2 shipments are arriving earlier than Batch 1?

For the Specters, they were small enough for them to be shipped via Air, which is how they ended up arriving a lot sooner than expected. But that’s not the complete picture because the Specters are not the only shipments that are arriving earlier. Some other customers in Asia have been receiving their larger sets too. Whilst this is pretty good news for those customers, it’s not something I imagine Batch 1 customers would want to hear. As you know, we try to be as transparent as we can and share all our issues with you as it’s how we’d like to be treated as customers ourselves.

Since shipping was a major headache in our previous run and something we wanted to get a handle on for this run, we decided to focus our energy on trying out different shipping partners in order to find one that operates in a way that we can work with effectively so that we can service you all better. It’s part of our ongoing experimental approach to help improve the quality of our service. It turns out that our shipping partner #2 has (so far) been very on the ball and it’s not something we’ve been used to up until this point. So fingers crossed that we’re able to keep this momentum with shipping going and can finally stabilise that critical part of our business.

Batch 3

These will be locked and shipped by our 2nd shipping partner soon. If you’ve not ordered yet but would like your set before Christmas, this is probably the last batch where we can guarantee you’ll get it before then. The next shipping batch may be possible, but it’s cutting it a little tight. Of course we can’t completely guarantee anything, but we have a lot more confidence in our 2nd partner so we’d just like for you to know that too.

Building our own instructions tool

To wrap up this update, I wanted to share that we’ve been hard at work building our own instructions tool. If you’ve ever tried to build instructions for a lego build, you’ll know that doing the instructions is arguably the least fun part, especially if you want to make a change to the build. The current tools that are available to the public are capable in some areas, but a complete pain in the butt to work with if you’re managing a large build and have fixes you’d like to implement - ie EB’s whole business model. We decided to take this massive inefficiency and fix this problem internally for ourselves.

If you’ve seen the new Specter instructions, you may not notice a huge difference from our SerialBuilder instructions, but they were built in completely different tools. The difference is that I was able to put the instructions together over a weekend with our new tool whereas without it, it would’ve taken about 1-2 weeks depending on the edits. It has completely sped up our workflow and it’s precisely how we’re able to create 25 new instructions for all the new Neo Bikes builds in the various colours.

We’re offering the tool to the creator community to use as well since our mission is all about making it easier for creators to create new sets. We will continue to pour resources into this area to help as many creators as we can along the way. The easier it is for creators to build instructions for their awesome builds, the easier it becomes for them to offer them to customers who are interested in their builds. Whether they’re our customers or not doesn’t really matter - we just want to see a lot more interesting builds made more accessible to the public.

If anyone is interested in trying it out, reach out to our newly minted Mocables team!

If you have any questions just leave them in the comments or hit us up at support. We’ll also try to provide updates to shipping timelines as we get them 😸