Hey y'all!
If you're reading this, first, let me say thank you for checking out our website! We're excited that so many people have been checking us out! We'll be using this blog to help maintain transparency with y'all so you know where we're headed as a company and what we're doing with the feedback y'all give us, so please keep checking back!
Quick catchup since our soft launch at GunCon.
Let's start by just saying THANK YOU to all of you who have been giving our OKP reproductions a shot. Even for those who don't like it, we've been reading your comments, taking notes, and learning from y'all. So sincerely, from everyone at CMM, thank you.
Improvements
Website
Next, if our updates to the website haven't been making sense to you, don't worry, you're not crazy, it's a bad website. We have a plan to improve the shopping experience. A couple of issues y'all have contacted us about that we're working on or that we identified.
- We kept breaking the website when we were trying to update inventory tracking.
- We broke the notifications tracker for restocks when we tried to stop it sending out random notifications.
- We took a bunch of product pictures and then broke the product page trying to load them.
So we have a plan to fix this that we'll be rolling out during the rest of August.
Shipping
We also identified a lot of issues with our shipping process related to how we were receiving shipments, storing them, and our QA/QC process. Between our shipments in July and starting in August we dedicated a single staff member to conducting QA/QC on our sights as they arrived, and then a second quick check on the way out. We also standardized packaging sizes and process and reorganized our shipping/inventory workspace. I think for those who ordered in August we had a much more consistent turn around time.
Repair Process
We had our repair process taking place in the same part of our shop as our prototyping, and that created a lot of mess and confusion. We've improved our intake process so that inventory and parts don't park in the same area as repairs. We've also implemented a digital tracking process for repairs to improve visibility across the shop and improve the customer service experience. We have some additional ideas on how to improve visibility for customers on where your OKPs are if they're coming back for repair, but those require additional testing.
Staffing
While we've been a team effort there's only been one of us (me) in the shop Monday through Friday, but we're going ahead and investing in additional positions to improve the workflow and provide the customer experience that we believe y'all deserve and should demand. This will also allow me to get back to focusing on working with our partners to keep our other projects on track so we'll have a lot more exciting options come GunCon 27.
New Products
Our OKP shroud is finalized and the initial batch will be going out before the end of the month for testing and feedback. The shroud snaps onto both the Dovetail and Picatinny mount OKPs and includes a fiber optic element to increase light collection for the reticle brightness sensor allowing it to continue to be visible under low-light conditions. The shroud also includes a sacrificial plexiglass lens to protect your OKP from debris impact from the front.
On the apparel front we are close to our final revisions on our Essential Button Down and Mountain Boonie and expect to be ready to ship in late September or early August.
There's more we'd like to share with you but this post is already long enough and we've been in the office every day for the last three weeks, so we'll put a pin in this for today. We'll do our best to post another update before the close of business Friday to give y'all some more information on what we're working on. Thank you all again and hope to keep hearing from y'all!
-Earle