If you’ve been watching The Upgrade in recent weeks, you know that the beginning of 2021 has been a hugely productive period for MAGFAST, with significant progress on a number of key fronts. Most importantly of all, we’ve been pushing our manufacturer hard to keep production on track.

Here’s the latest:

Tooling moves into manufacturing – Life, Extreme, Air: Great news: metal cutting for Life and Extreme tooling is now complete! We’re continuing to move into production. The not-so-good news: the engineers required a crucial adjustment in the design of Air to allow mass production tooling, which resulted in a two-month delay. This was regrettable but necessary in order to ensure that we deliver the highest quality, most advanced family of chargers possible.

Production of Life and Extreme will not slow because Air is running late.

Packaging in full production: Packaging for all three of our ‘first phase’ products – Life, Extreme and Air – plus the jumper cables that accompany Extreme, is now complete and we have issued a purchase order to our manufacturer for mass production. We worked long and hard to develop a packaging system that’s as beautiful as it is protective.

Fulfillment: We’re also happy to announce that we’ve selected our fulfillment partner, and our team is working closely with theirs to integrate our procedures and systems. Warehouse space has been allocated, and we are setting up the systems and partnerships with the carriers who will deliver to your front door.

New challenges: While tooling and packaging are moving ahead quickly, there are some new challenges out there in the world with supply and shipping:

• Global shipping disruption: While many people expected demand to drop during the pandemic, online shoppers at home have actually been buying more! With insufficient labor to unload cargo, there are now ships circling harbors unable to dock and containers piling up on dock sides in the U.S. and Europe, causing a severe container shortage in China. The cost of shipping from China is now up by as much as 400%, and rising.

• Global supply-chain disruption: Our manufacturing partners have been faced with component shortages. Disruptions in China’s ability to source, manufacture, assemble and ship products have hit everything from cotton for clothing and shoes to microprocessors for laptops, and chemicals for medicine production. Even electronic giants have been hit, including Apple and Samsung, both delaying product releases this year.

• Falling dollar: And there’s another factor: the dollar is worth almost 10% less against the Chinese Yuan than May last year – which pushes up the price of everything we bring in from China.

  
  

What does this all mean for MAGFAST and you?

Fortunately, with your amazing support, the news is still good:

Pricing: We are absorbing the increases in production and shipping costs. Your pre-order is safe and we will of course 100% honor the original price you paid, including your discounted pre-order rate.

Shipping: We’ve been pushing our manufacturers as hard as we dare to get the first units to our fulfillment center by the end of March. While they can’t quite hit that, we’re happy to report that the first units will roll out during April and the very first customers will receive them shortly after that.

Tens of thousands of awesome supporters are waiting for MAGFAST pre-orders to ship, which means we can’t yet predict exactly when you’ll get yours. But as soon as production ramps up, we will announce shipping batches with dates. And we’ll bring you video of those first production units, complete with all the enhancements.

Your support and patience continue to inspire us. We look forward to shipping your ground-breaking products.