OOOH WHEEE!
This year has been a flying mess.
Woosh, splat, repeat, and all of a sudden it’s autumn.
Every so often I like to kinda put down what’s been happening and what’s potentially coming up to keep yous all in the loop. So that’s what I’m doing now!
Firstly, I was totally overwhelmed with the response to the Swan Hunter release. We’ve never had a pedal sell so quickly. All 50 units from the site were gone in minutes and the 10 we had with our retailers went just as quickly. Thank you all very much!
Half of them have already shipped, but we’d hoped to have them all out the door by now. The rest of the first batch should ship by the end of the first week of October.
Rocktars will be after that and then it’ll be the second batch of Swan Hunters!
Increased demand and delays
In the last two months we’ve had more orders than ever before. We sold more in August and September this year than we did in the first 6 months of 2020. Unfortunately over the last few weeks we’ve had a couple of setbacks, some bad news and a small injury that have put us about two weeks behind schedule.
In a valiant and heroic attempt to not step on Mackie Longcat (pictured above) who decided to run right under my foot as I was walking, I managed to mess up my leg and hip (the same bits I have been having problems with since knacking them up in January).
A couple of days after that silliness I managed to slip on a rug which made it worse, a couple of days after that I then managed to slip on a mat which again of course made it worse, it’s been a ridiculous week in which sitting down for any period of time has been a painful chore, which means I haven’t been able to do a lot of pedal building.
I’m very sorry for the delay and I greatly appreciate all your support and patience.
Thank you for your kind messages and wishes.
The near future stuff
As we’ve got our hands full with builds at the minute, I’ve decided to not list any more pedals until we can get properly caught up and reduce lead times down to a couple of weeks for future batches.
I can’t give anyone a set date for when I’ll be listing anything else, but I can promise that more will be coming as soon as possible.
Due to some unfortunateness back home in the UK, I’ll more than likely need to head back for a short while too. With the state of international travel being what it is, it could take several weeks if restrictions and quarantine requirements change.
I don’t have an exact date for that and it depends on a few things, but I want to make sure I’ve cleared the decks of all outstanding orders before I leave.
Once we’ve caught up on the current orders over the next few weeks I’ll be in a better place to say when and what we’ll have available for order.
Unfortunately, the fun thing I had planned to finally put out as a limited release for halloween will also have to wait a while longer.
Mailing Lists
Mailchimp has been a bit of a pain in the bum recently, and has been a bit funny about merging and editing existing lists. I should have all of that up and running in the next week or so.
The plan is to have two mailing lists.
The general mailing list –
This is the news and info mailing list for new releases, events, limited runs and finishes, competitions and all those special things. These emails will only be going out a few times a year, and never more than once a month.
The restock notification mailing list –
This is an email that goes out every time new listings go up to let customers know when the listings are live. We’re merging the old Woozy and Skitter lists for this, but it’s going to be for all our pedals. The plan for the future is to do a restock once a month, probably with a couple of products going up at the same time. Again we don’t want to spam people, so once a month seems like a good limit.
In future we’ll be keeping output to roughly 40 or 50 pedals a month until we can handle a larger capacity whilst still getting the behind the scenes stuff done.
Over the past few months with everything that’s been going on, we’ve fallen behind on a few things (including manuals for the Swan Hunter and we’re way waaaaaaay behind with prototypes for new designs). There’s a long list of pedals and doowhackies we have planned for the future that we really need to move forward with. Which leads us to…
Expanding operations
It’s clear that we need to do a little expanding here.
Before the pandemic there was a lovely chap called John who would come in to help with drilling. Obviously as things got worse in spring 2020 we put a pause on that. Until recently I was struggling along without his help. But, luckily he’s been back in and helping with prep for a couple of months, but it’s obvious that we need more help. We’re very luck to have him, and he’s the resaon we’re not months behind!
Recently a local friend and pedal builder has been helping us with a soldering a few boards which has also been extremely helpful, but I think we need a second pair of hands doing population and soldering work on a more permanent basis. So it would seem we’re officially on the look out for someone to do regular soldering work for us.
The plan will still be for me to do final assembly and testing on all pedals before they go out the door.
Other stuff
Champion Leccy has been a 7 day work week for as long as I can remember. I occasionally have time off, but usually it’s an afterthought. I need to start budgeting time for myself for my physical and mental wellbeing as some of you rightly point out.
It is absolutely my plan to get back to composing music and doing some art..
I also have some vague plans to start doing more content in the future (all suggestions welcome). I even went as far as creating a Tiktok account. There’s nothing there yet, but there will be at some point no doubt.
In other musings I’m seriously considering discontinuing the Fettle Boost. It’s our longest running design and was the frst offical Champion Leccy original pedal.
We still have a bunch of Canny Fettle Boost enclosures that we’re waiting on, and we’ll certainly be doing a run or two of those as soon as we can.
We’ll have to see how things go, but I’m definitely considering clearing the decks before whatever releases we have next year.
A Giveaway!
The last thing I wanted to mention is a giveaway of some description.
The support, kind messages and patience many of you have shown towards me and Champion Leccy really mean a lot. And of course without yous lot buying so many of our pedals, I wouldn’t be able to do any of this.
So, towards the end of the year I plan on doing a giveaway as a thank you. I don’t have all the details lined up but I was thinking that the winner could choose a pedal (including discontinued designs like the Divvy, Sausage Fingers Bloody Gett and Evil twin) and I will do art for a one off etched enclosure for them.
Again all ideas are welcome.
And again THANK YOU, if you’ve read this far that’s quite amazing and I appreciate it very, very much.
Much love to yous all!
Woolly