Editing The Pen Addict 154/transcript (section)

== Pen Addict Artwork ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' You'll have to send me the link, yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So on the actual Apollo Kickstarter page, they have our old podcast artwork.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, I see. I see what you mean. Yeah, because we talked about it. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So they made sure you got yours. Don't worry about that. And, again, I don't have a problem with that. And I also don't have a problem with there being problems. I don't have a problem with there being delays. Like, you know, you mentioned this, but I always feel like I want to reiterate it. But if, like, you are issuing updates, it's great. But if you have this happen at least twice where you have an update where you say we're shipping, we're starting shipping on Monday, and then something happens. And then you do it again and something happens again. You need to be more careful about what you're saying in your updates. Because you're clearly having some fundamental problems of your manufacturing, and maybe you need to reconsider that a little bit. Right. You know, it's difficult.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think the sad thing at this point is I think there's a greater than zero chance that some of these backers do not get a product out of this. Which is a weird place for the Kickstarter failures. Usually when they fail, they fail at zero, right? I mean, they fail at 0% shipped, right? Or what's successful ones will be 100% shipped. This one's like, I'm pulling this out of the thin air, 28% shipped. It's very, very strange that it's in kind of this middle area where some of it's complete and delivered and people have the product in their hands. And some, like I said, I hate to say it, quite honestly, may never see this product. It's been a very strange ride for the Apollo technical pin.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. I didn't expect that to go on and on. But, yeah, it's an interesting project for sure.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Back on kind of the Kickstarter bandwagon, I wanted to talk about Knock real quick, if you don't mind, Sir Michael of Hurley. Our friends at Goulet Pens, Brian and Rachel Goulet, they have always been big supporters of the Knock pen cases. You know, I've sent them some samples. They love them. They get good feedback. They recommend us all the time on their Goulet Q&A for people looking to leather alternatives for their pen cases. Like, a lot of people are vegan or, you know, want to be more animal friendly. And, you know, we believe in that at Knock. And that's how our pen cases are made. And Brian mentioned that as a vegan friendly option.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Our Knock pen cases. And poor Brian and Rachel and a bunch of other retailers have been waiting for us so, so long to get into the retail market. And we're just struggling with that. You know, I want to be perfectly honest with everyone. We're having, we're working on our capacity issues as we speak. We have things going on in the background right now where we're trying to increase capacity. And, you know, for everyone who's looking for cases, not just directly from us, but looking for their favorite retailer to carry our cases, just know that we're working on it. I feel like we're the, we're the Apollo technical pen. We keep saying, yeah, we're going to get them out to retail. And we're like, not yet. It's like hard to promise dates. So I'm doing exactly, you know, some of the things I say not to do. But, you know, we keep the communication lines open with all the retail partners that we want to work with at Knock. And it will be coming one day soon. I just don't know exactly when that date is. But I appreciate all the support we get in the retailer community for our products. And we will get that settled out and straightened out one day, hopefully soon.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I want to just clarify something on your behalf. Sure. Because, you know, I just want to make sure that people understand, like, the struggle is not, there isn't a problem. The struggle is you guys are selling more than you can, than you can make. Yep. Yes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. We have no problems. Yeah. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's a, it's a great problem. Yes. To have. The problem that, that Knock are having is the online stores so popular that they can't even fulfill all of those orders as quickly as they would want to. Like, I was there with Jeff after the pen show and we, you know, I was helping him count out some stuff.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And, you know, we were, we were putting them on the store. Uh, and basically as soon as we could get them, as soon as we had them up, as soon as Jeff put them up on the store, they sold out like straight away. Like it was just like instantly just sold out. So, you know, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of crazy to see, but you guys are very, very popular.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. So, to, to clarify your clarification, um, we, it's, it's a good, we're in a good place. You know, we're in a very good place. We're very busy. We're trying to keep up. Um, the demand is super high. And so we want to deliver and meet those expectations that everyone has. And so we're just having to work on that, you know, as a, as a new business, these are kind of the things you go through. And this is a good problem to have to try to solve. And so we're trying to work on that solution right now.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It was funny. It was just like me, father, Kyle, and Punky sitting on the floor counting pen cases.