March 2018 Update

We’ve got some news so good it can’t wait until March 1.

International Shipments Starting

I’m tremendously excited to share this: we’re finally starting to notify customers that their international shipments are ready. We’re now building up International Basic and International Pro units for delivery, and are about to send them across the ocean - first, to EU countries, and then to others. To make that happen, a lot of things had to come together. Here are some important ones you should know about.

CE

International Basic & Pro units have earned the CE mark, making them legal for importation into EU countries.

Warranty

US laws allow a company a great deal of control over the warranty; European law defines a common set of standards for warranties. We’re deferring to EU law entirely for EU customers. As our friendly neighborhood lawyers put it, “If your shipping address is within the European Union, your country’s consumer product warranty laws apply.”

Shop and Catalog

The Shop (where you can buy Proofgrade materials and spare parts, soon to include replacement laser tubes) and the Design Catalog are not yet available to customers outside the US - we’re working to get those up as quickly as we can. In particular, we know international customers have been asking for spare laser tubes; we’re working to add those as soon as we can (for both US and international customers).

Terms

We wanted to simplify our pre-sales terms & our terms of service, previously two separate documents, to create a single reference point. We’ve done that now, merging them together and adding language specific to EU countries. In the next few days, our software will prompt everyone to review the new terms. We’ll make additional updates as we start shipping to additional countries.

Power

International Basic & Pro units now ship with some of the most common connectors for their destination countries. They operate off of both 120 and 230 VAC, so no transformer is required.

Lots of countries still coming

Our team is still hard at work preparing logistical and compliance matters for every customers’ country. We’re also getting regular updates from logistics and compliance professionals; these cause dates to move forward and backward based on which countries are progressing the most quickly. To see the latest forecast for when your unit will be delivered to you, whatever your country, just go to https://glowforge.com/account.

Thank you

Gracias,شكرا لكم, 고맙습니다, Vielen Dank, 谢谢, Danke, Je vous remercie, terima kasih, tack, ありがとうございました, grazie, Takk skal du ha, ขอขอบคุณ, Kiitos, شكرا, Dankie, תודה, go raibh maith agat, Спасибо, សូមអរគុណ, obrigado, ඔබට ස්තුතියි, நன்றி, Terima kasih, Paldies, Þakka þér fyrir, köszönöm, aitäh, teşekkür ederim, ευχαριστώ, Ďakujem, Dziękuję Ci, Дякую, Hvala vam, Merci, Děkuji, teşekkür ederim, धन्यवाद, tak skal du have, dank je.

That’s my best try to say “thank you” in as many of our customers’ languages as I could manage. Many of you have been with us from the very start. We wanted to share our vision of this product with people from around the world, and I know it’s been hard waiting for us to deliver.

We know being an international customer can be frustrating. We know it’s unfair. We, Glowforge, spend more time and money to deliver your product to you than we do for domestic customers. It costs us dramatically more to support an international customer than a domestic one. But still, the experience is worse for you than it is for domestic customers. Delivery takes longer, support may not be in your language, shipping costs much more, and on and on. Please know that we truly value you and everything you’ve done in supporting us which is why we’ve worked so hard to bring this product to you. We’re so exceptionally proud to see our first units headed across the ocean - we can’t wait to see what you will make with them!

Domestic Production Update

The factory has been churning out more Pro units than forecast lately, and as a result, we’re about caught up with all of our domestic Pro pre-orders. Basic units are pouring off the line so we’re making rapid progress delivering to all of our Basic pre-order customers too. International Basic and International Pro production are starting to take over line capacity, which will reduce the rate of domestic deliveries as we catch up. However, that’s all built into the forecasted ship dates at glowforge.com/account.

Tell us why you bought a Glowforge (and get a $20 credit)

As you might know, we’ve got an unusual approach to marketing. At a normal company, marketing would be focused on new customers. But here, when we think about something we might want to do marketing-wise, we first ask ourselves, "Is there a way we could do this that benefits our amazing customers?” (For example: our referral program, which put our marketing dollars in customers’ pockets!)

So when our new head of marketing @Michelle and I started talking about understanding our customers, we decided to see if we could bypass customer research firms and go directly to you, the tremendous people who made this company possible. We have no idea if this will work, but it’s worth a shot! Read the details here if you’d like to learn more (you don’t need to have your Glowforge delivered yet to participate).

Status page

We strive to never let our service go down, but we’ve had occasional short outages - sometimes because of our software; sometimes because the services of Google or another big internet company fail and affect us. Some of you made the outstanding suggestion of hosting a status page on another server so that anyone can check and see if servers are having problems. Now, we’ve launched just that:

statuspage.glowforge.com

Should you have any trouble using the service, you can check here to see if it’s a wider internet outage first. Thank you for the terrific idea; we’re a better company for your help and suggestions.

This Rules

One more small thing: we know the Glowforge UI hasn’t embraced the metric system yet, but we prepared a small token to make our international friends feel welcome. Metric versions of the Founder Ruler and Gift of Good Measure will be coming shortly, free, to all Glowforge customers. You’ll find them on your Dashboard at app.glowforge.com.

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Please join us to discuss this update here.

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