Dear customers, dear WBF members,
Dear customers from Hong Kong joining the forum,
I wish your reasons for joining were in better spirits, like sharing your experiences with your Olympus server. Nevertheless, I wish you all a warm welcome here.
Let me start with a recap of what’s been going on to get you up to speed without having to read back the whole thread:
The December 2023 Olympus introduction announcement was met with an overwhelming response, followed by an unprecedented number of orders, not just for us, this would be mayor for virtually any boutique manufacturer, reaching around 150 in just 2 or so weeks! For some context, we have built and shipped around 500 Extreme servers, but spread over a 6 year period. Absolutely incredible and I cannot even begin to express how proud and honoured we all felt and still do.
Of these around 110 ended up being firm orders, the counter is at around 160 right now, but those orders have been placed over the course of 2024, averaging at about 1 a week. We’d have little to no trouble producing 1 Olympus a week, the problem is in the first huge batch of 110. Of these we have now shipped 76 (28 of these with an I/O). We have assigned queue numbers but following those does not give a completely accurate picture, some are double / ordered same time, there are also gaps / unallocated queue numbers of people ending up not committing, etc. Fact is of the initial 110 there are now 34 orders remaining to be fulfilled, which are your, by now, 14-month-old orders.
We have faced, and solved, many issues over the past 14 months producing the Olympus, which have been shared in this forum thread, but 1 remains, being a rate limitation in the anodising / finishing of the Olympus chassis. The company who has been doing our anodising for years did the first few chassis, then refused to continue due to the amount of labour involved. As it turns out, the mechanical size and complexity of the Olympus chassis parts exclude it from automated / robotised finishing. Each part takes 4 hours of (skilled) manual labour to finish, that is 8 hours for an Olympus server, 4 hours for an I/O. Europe being Europe, artisan labour has become a precious, hard to find commodity, let alone in quantity.
Now we did manage to find a company willing to finish the Olympus chassis for us, at an exemplary quality level to boot. The owner of this company is an audiophile, he understands the quality requirements and has been willing to invest the time and energy to work with us. They keep records of every part they finish, the colour is the same, even if you’d switch your aluminium alloy, they can produce the same colour. They are perfect for the job. However, a quick calculation shows a very long time required to get through the backlog. They have 2 skilled labourers (his sons) who can produce this finish quality, but obviously they were already allocated to already existing contracts. They offered to work evenings + Saturdays for the remainder of 2024, with an output of 12 chassis parts a week, 2 people, 4 evenings + Saturdays, being for example 6 servers, or 4 servers and 4 I/Os a week.
Unfortunately, we subsequently ran into the, at the time, unexplainable phenomenon of a high chassis rejection rates, which turned out to be caused by mixing issues / contamination in the raw aluminium blocks. This has been “solved” recently, we’re now at a 15% rejection rate. But in 2024, “only” 180 chassis parts have passed QC and have been shipped in the form of the 76 Olympus servers and 28 I/Os mentioned before.
Although the work-in-overtime deal is over, the anodising company has expanded their facilities over the past few months, ordered and installed additional machinery, and has now offered the same 12 chassis parts (being for example 6 servers, or 4 servers and 4 I/Os a week, and now with a ~15% rejection rate).
Next to this we have found another anodising company and a coating company, both of which look like they can produce the quality we’re after.
As for communication, or lack thereof, we have absolutely been struggling with that. Probably not everybody knows that before the launch of the Olympus, Taiko Audio was largely operated by unpaid volunteers, out of passion. Any profit made was invested in R&D and capabilities, which is probably why it’s said we appear to have been moving faster than some others.
@Christiaan Punter was the first (and in 2023 only) (part-time) employee under contract / with a salary. Over time, with a slowly but surely growing customer base, it was already starting to be increasingly difficult to keep up with communication. This however got completely out of control with the Olympus announcement. Leaving us no other choice but to aggressively start hiring people. We now have 11 full time employees on the payroll and have purchased and installed a professional helpdesk/ticketing system. 4.75 of the 11 are currently allocated to customer communication, we are now able to reply e-mail/WhatsApp/text enquiries reasonably fast, and we have now started an e-mail list to provide regular updates to everyone who has ordered an Olympus directly. This staff allocation has to be a temporary measure as our sales do not cover an overhead like that, which is why we are in the process of moving towards supplying exclusively to distributors, outsourcing sales and first line customer support to distributors and their respective dealers.
This has become a somewhat longer post then intended, I hope it clarifies what’s been going on behind the incredible response on the launch of the Olympus and the challenges we’ve had to deal with as a result. We’re fully aware the wait has been excruciating long, I do hope you can muster up a little more patience, I would hate to lose you as a customer.
