When are the pre-sale masks shipping? This is a question that gets asked at least two or three times per day on Insiders. Rather than message each person who posts directly to give them the update, which I've been trying to do, I figure a blog post is necessary to give everyone clarity on the situation.
The holiday supply chain slow down really took its toll here. If we did a mask pre-sale any other time of the year, except directly in the most hectic production and logistics period maybe ever, these would have been delivered to everyone in two to three weeks. I really believe that. But since we did the pre-sale in mid November, one week before Black Friday, it got massively delayed every step of the way.
I think deep down I anticipated this delay which is why I made the pre-sale window four to eight weeks from November 16th. But I always like to under promise and over deliver and unfortunately even that eight week timeframe was pushing it.
That's the name of the game when it comes to trying something so ambitious for the first time. Take your best plan... think of the worst possible scenario... and then completely blow it up. In the future I'm mandating a no presales black-out window from November 1st to December 31st because there is too much that could go wrong.
Now the good news. The masks should start shipping tonight and tomorrow. There are a lot that need to get processed but our team will be working tirelessly to get them all in the mail before the end of this week.
We learned a lot during this experience and any future presales will run much more efficiently. I love the idea of giving everyone the opportunity to get a design that they like through presale and I expect we'll be able to cut weeks off the process. We do appreciate everyones patience in this situation so thank you for that.