SnapShades Nation,

It’s been a weird and busy last few weeks. And we owe you an update. Here’s the TL;DR version:

Good News: All the colors are done (gold looks awesome). Painted Logos are done. Darker lenses have been sourced.

Less than good news: The hinge is still giving us some trouble.

OK, so what now? When we first sourced this, we had a model that we had vetted through 6 rounds of physical prototyping, backed by a supplier who had also prototyped and confirmed the design. What we discovered in the first round of samples was that there was some unexpected variation in the results of the production process/materials. We fed that back and our supplier tried, on their end, to account for this and correct. Unfortunately, that did not work.

SO, we are attacking this from two fronts. We have redesigned three different aspects of the hinge area and have sent the CAD to our supplier. These modifications will almost double our hinge interaction. We’ve also begun working with a domestic supplier to see if they could give us higher accuracy and shorter feedback cycles.

We’re doing everything we can to get these up to snuff and to production so you can rock the shades you ordered, and we cannot thank you enough for sticking with us during this development process. We will keep you posted as we hear back both from our supplier, and our new domestic supplier.

Best,

Ari and Evan
Team SnapShades