Percentage of Orders Fulfilled
Jul 2nd 2021
In this post we want to talk about order fulfillment. Specifically, the amount of orders that we have fulfilled over the years and what we have left to achieve. We have created the table below to let our customers know that even though there have been production delays over the years, there has also been significant progress.
A quick history for folks that are newer to SURVIVE!: Guy began selling knives in 2012 and we remained completely caught up on orders at the start of 2015. At that time demand began to far outpace our production, so the SURVIVE! Starter was announced. That crowdfunding campaign was more successful than we had ever imagined it would be. The boost from those sales went directly to finishing equipment, materials, and to our subcontract service providers at the time for the heavy machining steps. But scaling up to meet that new level of demand brought with it unforeseen complications. Ultimately, we realized that we would never meet the fit & finish standards we were striving for while working with other companies, which meant we recently began investing heavily in becoming our own manufacturer. That does not mean we’ve just been sitting around doing R&D until we got it all figured out. We have been working hard, rerunning, hand fixing, and fighting our way through setbacks to get knives out as quickly as possible, while continuously improving and learning from each experience. Despite all the delays from those growing pains, we have accomplished a lot over the years. While we aren’t 100% caught up yet we have shipped out a lot of excellent knives. Now that we finally have all of the manufacturing happening in one location, we fully expect to be closing the books on our backlog in only a few short months.
Here is our table showing the percentage of orders that have been closed for each year that SURVIVE! has been in operation. We will continue to update this table with our progress so check back regularly to follow along. Keep reading below the table for more insight into when these will all reach 100%.
2015: Includes the earliest GSO-12, GSO-4.5, GSO-10, and GSO-8 preorders. This number will approach 99% in the next month or two, as the GSO-12 and GSO-4.5 preorders are fulfilled. There are not many GSO-10s and even fewer GSO-8s open from this year so that last 1% will be completed once the first batches of GSO-10 and GSO-8 orders ship.
2016: The orders from this year are about one-third GSO-4.5s and one-third GSO-5.1s with the remaining third a mix of other models. You will see the fulfilled percentage increase as we finish up the GSO-6 and GSO-12 runs with some big jumps once we get into the GSO-4.5s. It will reach 100% in a few months, when that first round of GSO-5.1 preorders are completed.
2017: This one will be at 100% in the next month or two. Because we started limiting preordering around this time the only open orders from this year are for the GSO-6 and a small batch of GSO-12s. The large increase between the June and July count is from GSO-3.5 orders being finished.
2018: Ordering was completely turned off for most of 2018. The only orders that have yet to be fulfilled from that year are all for the GSO-4.5. This number will stay the same until we get further into shipping GSO-4.5s but then it is going to climb to 100% almost immediately.
2019: About half of the orders from 2019 are for the GSO-5.1 with the other half being a mix of other models. This one will be increasing steadily as we work our way through the various models. Then you will see a quick jump to 100% as we ship out GSO-5.1 preorders.
2020: There is a wide mix of orders from this year with the GSO-6s having the largest proportion of open orders. You will see a big increase, to up over 50%, as those are fulfilled through this month. After that this number will continue to increase steadily. 2020 was the year we introduced some of our newer models, but those preorders have been limited so they will be fulfilled much more quickly than past production runs.
