Price has increased, Shipping, Maker Faire recap
Hello! I wanted to update you with the latest here at Glowforge Central.
Every Friday we have an all-company meeting, and I always review our three existential priorities, in order:
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Build a product that’s safe and reliable
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Build the amazing, quality product our customers expect and deserve
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Ship that amazing product to you, our beloved customers, ASAP.
We continue to spend long hours focused on those three goals - and we’re getting close! But it’s been a month since I posted an update, so I wanted to share the very latest updates as we work like mad to get your Glowforge delivery ready.
Buying a Glowforge is now $2995-$5995
As we approach shipping, the discounts you received have come to an end. Upgrades and new purchases now cost significantly more; retroactive pricing is, unfortunately, not available. Don’t flaunt the price you paid; it’s not polite. 
Note that people are still placing new Glowforge orders, so you can still get another discount by sharing your referral code. You can find your personalized code by signing in at https://glowforge.com and clicking “Referral”. It’ll save your friends $100, and earn you a $100 rebate. You can read more detail here.
#shipping
Our schedule is still unchanged: ship 30-day crowdfunding units in December and units ordered subsequently in March. That’s terrifying and exciting for us, because we have a lot left to do and very little time left to do it. So let me take a minute to repeat something from our last update…
Q: So does this mean you’re absolutely certain you’ll ship on schedule?
A: No. Unfortunately our schedule can never be absolutely certain, because production surprises with far-reaching consequences can arrive at the last minute. We’re working every waking hour to get your Glowforge on time, but if you’ll forgive me repeating myself, meeting our schedule is the second-most important goal we have as a company - eclipsed only by making sure your Glowforge is as good as it can possibly be.
We’re now producing Glowforge printers at a faster rate than ever before, but the quality and consistency of the units is not yet high enough that we can increase the production rate, which is why we’re not shipping in volume yet. We are still making small adjustments to squeeze maximum performance out of the hardware, performing extensive manual inspections after each unit comes off the line, and making adjustments to the assembly and QA process to prevent mistakes. The last thing we want to do is send you a defective Glowforge. We are working to find and solve each root cause as we find it, and the production process is steadily improving.
At the same time, we’re working with a host of testing companies to certify the Glowforge printer as safe and legal to ship to everyone in all 76 countries that placed orders. Most of the tests are verifying functionality we finished long ago, but we’re always on guard for surprises that could crop up and cause delays.
Finally, the software team is hard at work on multiple fronts: flushing out bugs, improving the performance of the machine, and delivering all of our features as soon as possible.
All this is occurring in the context of feedback from our beta customers - we’ve been making adjustments to both hardware and software as we learn from them what’s working and what’s not.
Our next major milestone is to start shipping pre-release units at the end of November. Once we start putting those in people’s hands, we’ll have a much better sense of how December is going to go, and I’ll make sure to post another update.
##Showing Off Glowforge Printers
We generally stick to shuttling between our office and factory, hunkered down so we can focus on shipping your Glowforge to you ASAP. But occasionally we bring Glowforge printers out into the world so we can share them with you - and in September we brought them to Maker Faire Seattle, Maker Faire NYC, and Re:Make in San Francisco.
At the shows, we brought out some of the latest beta units and invited everyone there to print puzzles, toys, picture frames, luggage tags, and more. While the beta units we brought may not look that different from the ones at Maker Faire a year ago, these are dramatically transformed on the inside - these are engineered for mass production so that we can build one for you and everyone else who preordered one. They’re safer, more durable, more powerful, more accurate, more reliable, and easier to use than anything we’ve ever built. The software - even now, before it’s finished - has been taken to a whole new level. As those of you who saw it can attest, it’s simply a delight to use.
It’s company policy that every new employee has a chance to go to a show and meet the incredible people (you!) who make this all possible. We do that because after the first show we ever attended, our launch at Maker Faire New York one year ago, the team told me that meeting customers like you was one of the most amazing things they’d done at the company. And these are people who are working with lasers day in and out, so their jobs are already fairly amazing.
More than half the company went to the events last month, and if you had the chance to attend, you might have met anyone from our accounting team to our designers to our software developers. The experience of seeing what we’ve been working so hard on through the eyes of the people we’re working for is one of the best parts of our job. It helps remind us how special this community is and what we’re working for. Plus, some of you have really, really cute kids who obviously have brilliant careers in science and engineering ahead of them.
Our booth at Mini Maker Faire Seattle at EMP Museum, moments before the show started.
The same booth, right AFTER the show started.
The laser in action, printing a pendant from one of your impressive drawings
A whole family shows off what they printed at World Maker Faire New York.
Here are of the prints that our (very patient) booth visitors had a chance to create at our recent event appearances.
Tested.com’s Will Smith meets fans at the Glowforge booth after his live demonstration at World Maker Faire New York.
Lasers and kids! See what we mean?
##Thank you
I wish everyone had their Glowforge already.
We come into our office every day and print with these amazing machines every day, for both work and for play. But we’re late in delivering them to you, the people who made it possible. That’s not fair. We feel terrible about it.
I wish I could give you a shipping date and time to the minute, guaranteed. But the only way I could do that is if I decided we were willing to ignore problems to hit a deadline.
Please know that we are doing everything possible to deliver the best product we can, as soon as we can. I regularly sign 5- and 6-digit checks for rush orders that are solely intended to accelerate the delivery of your product. As you know, we decided to pay a premium to assemble your Glowforge unit in an American factory, in no small part to avoid the 30 days of ocean and customs time we would otherwise have before delivering. We’re working long, late hours.
We’re doing everything possible. The only thing we’re not doing is compromising on the product.
I know you’ve waited patiently. It’s been a year since we first showed Glowforge to the world, and four months since we hoped to have it on your door, every day of which we feel painfully and personally. Should you want to give up, we’ll understand completely and, of course, issue a full refund immediately. Should you decide to stick it through with us, though - we can’t wait to get you your Glowforge.
–dan
