Monday, May 03, 2010

Stronger Box Handles Coming Soon

Our new boxes are selling quite well, and we're very happy for that. What we're much, much less happy about is the strength of the box handle. When we were prototyping the box, which took about 8 months, we raised concerns several times with our supplier that the handle seemed week. "Don't worry" kept coming the response, "our engineers are sure this will be strong enough; remember this is just the prototype, the final boxes will be much stronger".

I wish we had insisted on a stronger box design, because sure enough, within a few days of the boxes hitting the shelf, we started getting calls and emails from customers who had had a close call or worse after the handle snapped off the box.

We immediately got on the phone to our supplier, and we've come up with a short term way to make the boxes that we have a bit stronger while we redesign the top of the box to eliminate the problem. We have a reinforced handle design we like, and will be switching suppliers, too.

In the meantime, please try to hold the box from the bottom for the next couple of weeks. If you do have an unfortunate handle incident, please let us know about it and give us a chance to make it better for you.

1 comment:

Matt_Middleton said...

Haven't experienced this problem, but thanks for the heads-up!