2017: The Debrief.

Welcome to the new format, if you are reading this thank you so much for taking a deeper interest in MURO, you could become a very important part of this company in the future (more on this to come).  

Christmas 2017 will forever be a significant date in my mind, it had never been my intention to be delivering a kid’s product in the run up to Christmas and thus making myself responsible for ensuring kids got their Christmas presents!  Having finished the Kickstarter campaign back in May and with the protracted delivery times this responsibility had become pretty abstract, going through the delivery process has brought it back into sharp focus and is going to be taken much more seriously going forward.

This has been the culmination of 4 years work and to stumble across the line was a bit gutting to be honest, but that being said there have been some important lessons which I’m glad to have had at this point rather than further down the line.

1. Check and check again.  As some of you found out we ended up not having enough stock to fulfill all the orders, despite visiting our factory to ensure that we did.  The problem was that the quantities stated on the outside of shipping cartons did not match up with the its contents in lot of cases.  I should have checked this but didn’t.
2. Outsource with care.  The company I chose to help were the wrong company, in hindsight it’s glaringly obvious that it was a bad fit, they were too big and MURO does not fit into a standard fulfilment model. However, one big positive which has come out of this is the appreciation of how integral the whole supply chain is to our customer experience and I will be taking this on board going forward.  Moving fulfilment in-house will allow us to give accurate and immediate information when customers have queries, rather than the current process which requires an email chain and leads to queries being lost.
3. Lots of work to do.  The product still needs lots of work. We still have a range of toys to manufacture this year and released through MUROmembers, the retail packaging needs to be designed and some thing we have made need tweaking!

I do not mean to sound gloomy, overall I’m very happy.  I’m proud of the product that has been produced and that the majority made their way to the right people on time.  2018 is going to be an important year, it’s time to take MURO out of its current stage (somewhere between prototype and product), build a commercial product and the infrastructure to support this.  I hope that MURO develops as much in 2018 as it did in 2017.

Thank you for your support. Happy New year and all the best for 2018.