#tileisshipping

First, I want to assure you that we know you want your Tiles right away. Many of you have waited for close to a year for your Tile, and some people in the EU have waited even longer. This is not what we envisioned when we set out on our crowdfunding campaign a year ago. We want nothing more than to ship every Tile ever ordered tomorrow. We literally talk about the wait multiple times each day and it is the top priority for every employee at Tile.

If you ordered before August 15th, 2013, your Tiles are waiting for you. However, you must confirm your shipping address before we can mail them. If you have not already done so, or are unsure, you can click this link to resend it. If you don't see it in your inbox or spam, please email our Customer Success team at [email protected].

Second, let me give you an idea of where we are today. To date we have shipped over a quarter million Tiles, but we know we have to ship faster. We have worked hard with our manufacturing partner to develop a plan to increase production as quickly as possible. We track our manufacturing goals on a daily basis to ensure Tile production volume increases week by week as planned (see the current estimated ship schedule here). Unfortunately, there are challenges every day to maintain that plan as we hold our ourselves and manufacturing partners to a very high level of quality. (In addition, we standby Tile with a 1 year warranty and 30 day refund policy.)

Specifically, we have seen one major bottleneck in our manufacturing process. We designed Tile to be sleek and simple and that is symbolized in the beautiful white plastic case. It turns out that it is not easy to get a manufacturing line to produce such a precision part in huge quantities at the quality we want to provide. These parts are made using a process called plastic injection molding, and the tool required to produce them is custom made for Tile, is large, is very complicated and takes months to build each one. After our crowd funding campaign, we believed that just one of these tools would be sufficient for producing all of our Tiles.

After just a few weeks, it became abundantly clear that our lone tool would not be good enough. The only way to make larger quantities of Tiles is to build additional injection molding tools. As of two weeks ago, our second tool is up and running and we are producing more Tiles each week than we did the week before. In addition, that number will continue to increase as we have several more of these tools being built and will come online in the coming weeks.

I know that you’ve waited for a long time, and much longer than you or we anticipated. I apologize for that but feel confident that you’ll be delighted with the end product.

Finally, I speak for the entire Tile team when I say we appreciate your support and patience, and we know that we wouldn’t be here without you.  The wait is almost over for everyone.  If you haven't looked at what people are Tiling, take a look on Instagram and Twitter. #TiledIt 

Mike Farley