5 reasons why your Kickstarter reward is @#$%ing late

Having pledged a couple of Kickstarter projects prior to launching my own, we all have heard of notorious stories of late deliveries, often months beyond the promised delivery date. As backers, we have often cursed and sworn at the project creators for bad services.

Now that I am on the other side of the fence, I can well empathize with creators who need to deliver manufactured goods to the backers. Prior to manufacturing Wongamania: Banana Economy in China, we have done two smaller print runs from a smaller manufacturer from Malaysia and were confident that we will be able to handle the much bigger print run in China with ease.

After our Kickstarter project ended in December 2015, we made provisions for two months’ worth of projection management and one months’ worth of production and delivery time. Little did we expect that our production only started during the mid of May 2016.

So in case you are wondering why your Kickstarter projects were coming in so late, let me share with you five reasons why our Kickstarter project was late to deliver. Although what I experienced pertains to tabletop games, I am quite sure that it will also be pretty relevant to other small project creators who are designing other physical products.

Reason 1: Huge number of Chinese holidays

It’s no joke when people say that Singaporeans are one of the most hard working bunch of people in the world with few public holidays.

Compared to us, China has a huge number of official and unofficial holidays, many of which fall on the first half of the year. Many factories often give extended holidays on top of the official dates to allow their workers extra time to travel back to their hometowns. Workers can have up to one month off for Chinese New Year and one week off for Labor Day.

There is also the pre-holiday mood syndrome that affects everyone in the world, where productivity slows as everyone is more interested in the preparation for the holidays than clearing their work. Then there is the post-holiday forgetfulness, where you will
have to communicate your requirements again… just in case.

Photo credit: Holidays in China

Reason 2: Prototype retooling

Before we can green light productions, we need to approve the printing plate and the prototype. The whole process takes 10-20 days.

During our previous production runs, we did not have to deal with plastic or metal components, but this time round, we have a couple of such components. Needless to say, the component prototype did not turn out ideal, and we had to fine tune the components over weeks in order for the quality of our banana prints to meet our standards.

Reason 3: Major conventions

Reason 4: Excessive stretch goals

Reason 5: Different folks, different stroke

What we learnt