September TNT
over 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 04, 2022 at 01:03:48 AM

Terragons News Time

Hello everyone. This is going to be a short update this month.

We are excited to say that tiles are coming through, however, it has been a frustrating start. Our injection molder did not follow our agreed upon plan, and ran only 2 tile colors by mistake: Green and Stone. 

While they are certainly popular colors, we cannot begin fulfillment with these colors alone. We are batching backer numbers together and working through the pledges in smaller groups.

So, fulfillment is in progress, we have the first run of tiles, and we are working on filling out the first orders. Unfortunately, we are now waiting on the injection molder to get us more colors so we can continue with production.

This is of course incredibly frustrating, but we are doing everything we can to keep things going and be prepared to get these boxes shipping as soon as possible.

We are excited as we move forward, since the quality of the tiles coming through is incredible! We cannot wait to get these into your hands.

That's all for this week, see you in the next TNT.

Tile Review!
over 1 year ago – Sat, Sep 03, 2022 at 10:18:20 PM

This is a quick update for everyone but we wanted to share Rybonators review of some of the sample tiles we sent him!

We are excited to get things moving and get these in your hands soon!

Backer Only Pre-Order Discount
over 1 year ago – Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 02:49:10 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Pre Order Annoucement & July/August TNT
over 1 year ago – Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 11:53:40 PM

Terragons News Time

We are happy to announce that we have oficially launched pre-orders on our website! Check it out below:

 Terragon Terrain Pre-Order Page 

Now before we go any farther we want to ensure all backers know that not a single pre-order tile will be PRODUCED before the kickstarter tiles are done. We will fulfill the entirety of the Kickstarter Backer orders first, then the Backerkit pre-orders, and finally begin fulfilling the pre-orders.

Exclusive Kickstarter Backer Discount

As a thank you to all of you amazing backers we are offering an exclusive disount for our backers. This will be the biggest discount available to anyone, and gets the price down closer to kickstarter pricing.

This 15% off discount will be active for the duration of the pre-order. And the pre-order will be up for some time after Kickstarter fulfillment is complete. So any backers who wish to purchase more Terragons can do so at the best price available!

We will be sharing this code in a private update post shortly.

Why are we doing a pre-order?

While we have covered this question before, we want to cover it again. We are not using the pre-order to pay for Kickstarter fulfillment. We have ALL the funds we need to fulfill. So now it is only a matter of time for production to fully ramp up.

The pre-order comes with a huge list of benefits. Firstly it helps us gauge demand and begin projections of what we will need. We are talking millions of magnets, hundreds of thousands of pieces, and many other materials. Being able to accurately see demand allows us to prepare to scale.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the pre-order is the ability to increase the scale of all of our operations to meet demand. The greater the demand for the tiles, the more funds we have to do things like buy another mold, push for larger production goals, and much, much more. This will all help us get tiles out faster.

How is production going?

We visited our assembler early this week. We expected the first few weeks to be a learning curve as we gauge production rates and optimize the process. We are finally getting close to our initial quota of 2000 tiles a day.

We purchased two presses to assist with tile assembly. Not only does the press ensure the tile is properly seated together for a nice flush top and bottom face, but it also increases production speed greatly. We can purchase more presses to increase production as we move forward. Currently the assembler has competed about 3,000 Grass tiles and 3,000 stone tiles. This is under our original projections but this is also to be expected as making thousands of tiles is far different than a few hundred. 

Since Grass and Stone were in greatest demand we started with those as we had simply ordered more of them. So the losses through trial and error impact the overall stock far less.

We are happy to announce the high quality of the tiles from both the assembler and the molder, and fully expect things to get up to full speed quite quickly. Once we set the pace we will be pushing to go even faster. Without sacrificing quality of course.

In conclusion, we want to thank all of our amazing backers once again! You have helped us achieve our dream, and we are only getting started!

Stay safe and see you in the next TNT!

June TNT
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Jul 07, 2022 at 08:19:59 AM

Terragons News Time

We have just finished assembling the first run of tiles from the finished mold and we are so happy to announce that they are PERFECT.  

We will tell you a bit more about how we tested 64 tiles to ensure there were no issues, but we want to take a second to thank everyone who has supported us. We have been waiting so long for this day now all we have to do is run the tiles, assemble, and ship them.

So what is next? Well our Injection Molder will run the tiles, they will be delivered to our assembler, who will make the tiles and package them for pickup. We will then pickup the completed tiles and package them for fulfillment.

How are we ensuring you get your tiles ASAP?

We have taken a few steps to ensure that we get these tiles in your hands as soon as possible. First is how we are placing orders with our Injection molder. Instead of running each color one at a time until we have enough of that color for the kickstarter, we are doing smaller runs of each color, ordered based on the demand for the amount of tiles needed for the next orders based on backer number.

For instance, if we ran just green (our most popular color), it would take weeks to finish and even when they are done we cannot fulfill any orders because no one got JUST green. So we have to wait until pretty much every color is done to fulfill.

Instead we are breaking tiles up into shorter time frames. We know how many tiles we can get in a week, so we use that number to place an order that fills the most orders with that time. 

On top of that we have partnered with our assembler to deliver tiles as fast as they can be made. This is all out of pocket and we have already recieved the funding for it. But we all agree that getting these tiles into our Backers hands is priority number ONE.

Whats the schedule look like?

Our Injection molder gave an estimate of 4 months to produce ALL of the tiles for the kickstarter. While our assembler gave us an estimate of 4 months to assemble all of the product. Assembly is scheduled to begin about 1 month after production begins. 

This means within 2 months fulfillment should begin. Now I (Corey) have meetings planned with both parties to try to reduce that even further. But once these things start coming off fulfillment should be complete in 5 months.

We will be going by backer number, as we feel that is the fairest approach.

So what about that testing I talked about?

The mold we had made for our tiles creates the parts needed to make 8 tiles every "shot". Which is what they call runs or cycles. Laymans terms it means every 45-60 seconds 8 new terragons are born just needing to be assembled.

So there are 16 cavities in the mold, 8 tops, 8 bottoms. Now even with the precision machining we have nowadays there can be slight differences. So I paired every top with every other numbered bottom, to ensure that all tops fit on all bottom pieces. And they came out amazingly!

In Conclusion

We are incredibly excited to be at this point, and we are certain that when you get your tiles in your hands you will know they were worth the wait. We have put everything we can into these tiles to make sure they are the best quality possible, made right here in the USA.

Thanks and see you in the next TNT!