Pre-Order Shipping Status Update

Hello everyone,

There have been some delays with Logic 8 and Logic 16 that have come to light over the last 2 weeks.

**Logic 8 **

Status: ~45 pre-order customers still do not have their Logic 8’s and we will not be able to ship them for 1.5-2 weeks.

There have been two issues here.  The first is that we ran out of PCBs because of calibration failures, and were unable to get those PCBs working;  More PCBs are currently being assembled but clearly the situation is very frustrating for the last ~45 Logic 8 customers this affects.  I eventually sent an email to these ~45 customers, but it should have been delivered as much as a week or more sooner.

The 2nd issue — and in my mind the more unforgivable issue — is that we started to print out everyone’s labels, including FedEx shipping labels — in an attempt to batch process more efficiently, as well as because we thought that we would be shipping all of them over the course of a few days or so.

The trouble with this was that this caused these orders to show up as “Label Printed” in our system — so when people wrote in asking “what is my order status” several of us over here looked up these individual’s orders, concluded that they were just about to ship, and indicated this to the customer along with their tracking number.  This went on for ~2 days before we realized what was happening and notified everyone doing support over here that “Label Printed” no longer meant what it normally did!  This means that perhaps 10-20 customers were directly told that their order was shipping when in fact it wasn’t.  Then — and where we really screwed up — is that for some reason we failed to immediately notify these 10-20 people of our mistake, which resulted in many of them understandably becoming quite upset!

And, as it would turn out, people clicking their “order status” links in their emails also can see a tracking number in there, regardless of if their unit has actually shipped or not.

Logic Pro 16

Status: ~143 pre-order customers still do not have their Logic Pro 16s.  ~30 are shipping today to the oldest of these, and the remaining 110 will be shipping Friday and Monday.

Here we have roughly the same story:  these boards had some sort of assembly or component defect issue (I’m still not sure exactly what it is yet) with some of the ultra-tiny load switch components, causing especially low yield that prevented shipping all the pre-orders as planned.

In addition, we had the same issue as detailed under Logic 8 above regarding the labels being printed early.

Concluding Thoughts

It has been a struggle to juggle the many fires constantly erupting over here — and try to make the right calls as to what gets priority for our highly limited staff.  This incident painfully reinforces how critical it is that we rapidly communicate with customers any issues that arise.

I am enormously frustrated recalling the mistakes that I have personally presided over which have caused such a disagreeable customer experience.   I feel that I have apologized so many times over the past months that it perhaps is in danger of becoming meaningless, so I will refrain from overtly doing so here yet again, but you know how I feel.  The one thing that keeps me going is that we will get though these hard times and with the right fixes to our systems and processes this situation in principal is entirely avoidable going forward.

-Joe Garrison, CEO