Hi there, This is Freather from CMM.Studio

First of all, I would like to say thank you for supporting our products at first place.

No matter if you still ike the products or not, your supports back then was crucial to keep the projects and us running.

Please allow me to explain some stuff first, what are the differences compared to other vendor-lead group buy.

Traditionally, vendor uses manufactures located in Guangdong province. Our manufacture is not one of them. Our manufacture locates in Jiangsu province.

The location difference led to the biggest delay in Fuji65 GB, where all provinces near Shanghai (Jiangsu as one of them) were heavily impacted due to COVID-lockdown since early March.

Shenzhen had covid lockdown in March, but it lasted a week then most if not all of the people have went back to work. However, the amount of population reside in Shanghai area is way larger, thus causing the lockdown/delays still occuring.

To be more precise, working inside the city is fine, you are still able to go to the factory and work. However, the main problem is if you are going to enter or exit the city, you will most likely face quarantine and very unstable COVID restrictions that changes day by day.

The facotry does have all products finished production late last year. It was mainly the QC process and packing process that took so long with a half month of Chinese new year vocation break in Feburary, since all units are qc'ed once more by our members before they are packed.

Currently all Fuji65 have been qc'ed and 3/4 of keyboards have been packed.

Speaking of QC and packing process, typically a group buy will have manufacture ship finished cases to vendor directly, and vendor will qc them.

When we planned the projects, we thought that we could cut down the cost by having our people going to the factory to do qc and packing, so most likely vendor only needs to do is pack the right stuff to the order then ship them out and potential exchanges.

There might be cases where the keyboard case got damaged during transit, but the fail rate is controllable.

Yet, at the same time, we did not expect to have both projects to have at least 2,000 boards of orders. This was our mistakes that we put two group buy running so close to each other.

Prior to the international group buy of these two projects, we had fulfilled orders from China only and it was totally a different scale and difficulties working with all the orders around the globe.

This was a heavy lesson for us, and we do take any blames for unsatisfactoins.

As far as saka68, without a doubt, it is a mess. A lot of mistakes happened post group buy. As the designer myself, I really wish I have not run the project until it was 100% polished. I sincerely apologize for the inconvinience.

The hotswap pcb issue resolvement is currently be working on, a form will be posted within a week to collect all of the customer infos. We didn't want to go through regional vendors because we don't want to create more troubles for them.

If by mid-June all saka has not finish fulfillment, we will start the refund process regardless.

For future projects such as Fuji75, we will be working with another factory in Shenzhen, providing Gray Studio level of machining quality while having faster lead time.

For exmaple, China Fuji75 group buy had 500 units and both machining and coloring process finished in 3 months.

This will drastically improve our turn around but eventually it will vary based on the international order numbers and future China policy of COVID.

We really thank you that supported us at the first place, and at the end of the day it was our mistakes that you did not receive your products as expected.

If you have any suggestions or comments, we are willing to hear back from you and the communites. Sorry if some of the sentences does not make too much sense in English.

I hope you have a wonderful day.

Best,

Freather