Where did all the MURO's go?

It’s been a while and it’s definitely time for an update, but where to begin!

If you have been following our instagram or placed an order with us in the last 6 months you’ll probably know that it’s been a turbulent time at MURO with supply chain issues that looked like it could bring the whole thing to an end.

The pandemic travel restrictions prevented us from overseeing production in person and despite all the emails, video calls and 3rd-party quality control processes when our last batch of stock arrived in the lead up to Christmas 2020 one part had been manufactured badly.  Unfortunately for us, that part was our connector, the most important part that’s used on all of the toys, fundamentally crippling the product making the whole shipment unsellable.  

The connector had mysteriously grown and warped since the sample we had signed off, and to compound this there was a greater range in the size of holes in the boards and cubes than with our previous manufacturer.  This meant that in some cases the toys required so much force to connect, if they could be connected at all, and in other cases they just fell out!  

This would be heartbreaking for any company, but it felt especially hard for us after working  super hard to get back on top after a difficult previous year.  With all our capital invested into stock we couldn’t sell, the situation for the business was, and still is critical and there was no immediately obvious route back from it.

After exploring a number of avenues over the beginning of this year we now have a strategy to get back on our feet and get MURO moving forward again.  Over the next few months we are going to replace all of the connectors with a newly designed version that will make the stock sellable again and will be an improvement on the previous version.  This might sound like the simple, obvious solution but with 25,000 to change it’s a serious undertaking and one we hoped we could somehow avoid.  However like most problems, the best way past them is through.

If you have been waiting to get your hands on a MURO then we have good news, we expect to have plenty of sets back in stock at the end of the summer this year.  And for our existing customers, we’re really sorry not to deliver on our promise of new exciting additions just yet. Before this problem we had been looking forward to developing and launching some new products.   We still intend to do this, however, we’re not able to say when that will be but we hope by mid-2022.