So I have ordered the Ono mini SLA printer altogether with a few resins for Casting, a flexible one and a standard resin. They didnt sell them at the MakerFaire in Berlin this year. Unfortunately I have three more weeks to wait until it arrives here. I am curious how it works out though. As soon as it arrives I will show it off here a bit. Altogether it cost me 170€. Hope there wont be additional fees.
Information is here:
Ono isn’t making too many friends with their Kickstarter supporters. Selling something retail at the same time the KS people haven’t received product doesn’t say much for the company. If you haven’t yet viewed the KS campaign, consider to read the comments to see how the “investors” are treated.
@Fred_U That’s pretty shitty…
Lots of people on KS have been whiny little princesses. I wish they would give refunds so we didn’t have to listen to all the whining.
That said, OLO/ONO is over a year late delivering to KS and they have been very poor on communicating what’s going on. When I see promises that we will see them this month… well, I think I’ve heard that more than once before.
It’s very unlikely you’ll get your unit. I’ve talked to them before and they always say they’re ready to ship in a few months. It was funded a year and a half ago and they spend all the money from the Kickstarter on marketing rather than getting the pre-orders to the backers. If they ever actually ship the units I highly doubt they’ll have strong support and the company will likely go under.
Cool idea, horrible business practices.
Edit: to be clear I am not a backer of this product
@Dave_Durant well I’d be pissed too if the thing I paid hundreds of dollars for was a year late.
It’s not hundreds of dollars… It was $125 when I got in and was as low as $79 for early sign-ups.
Thats pretty suboptimal. I hope they will get it done anyways. Maybe I’ll See them at the formnext or another faire to get some answers. Maybe…
I spoke to them at World Maker Faire and a guy told me they were on track to ship all Kickstarter units by end of January but he also told me he’s only been with the company a few months
Same here. I wanted to buy one right from the MF stand and thats what they told me too.
They had prepackaged units there and were refusing to sell them, no demos from prototypes either. Some even claim their demo prints come from other machines.
If thats true I am dumb probably. Foo…
Well presumably you ordered from their site because they weren’t taking cash orders from the booth and you haven’t received any product from them so you can always cancel the payment through your credit card company.
Thats right. When I ordered it they said it will take 5 weeks until it would be here. If it doesnt arrive I will sure do so.
When companies sell retail before delivering Kickstarter backer rewards, it’s seemingly ALWAYS because they ran out of money and are trying to use retail sales proceeds to get out of the hole. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. I haven’t heard of it ever working out in the end…
@Ryan_Carlyle I’m pretty sure MOD-t and Tiko sold units on their website before shipping units to all their backers. Kudo3D is selling the Bean through Indiegogo while they process their Kickstarter orders, I’m not sure if they did something similar with the Titan.
@Adam_Steinmark Tiko flopped during backer fulfillment and is a great example of my point – they were trying to use retail sales to get out of a hole. MOD-t was very different in that New Matter was a very experienced group of guys to start with, and from what I can tell didn’t really need the Kickstarter at all – it was more of a marketing / pre-order thing for them than a development funding campaign like the ONO and others. I’m not familiar with the Bean.
To be fair, manufacturing this stuff is all about scale, and typically the big cost is up-front tooling capital, training assemblers, etc. So anything you can do to increase volume will improve your economics. In that sense, it’s logical to keep selling after the initial crowdsourcing campaign. But it’s WAY too common for it to effectively be fraud as companies run out of money and set up what amounts to a pyramid scheme to try to stay afloat.
I recall their reps were telling people at one Maker faire last year that the machine wasn’t printing because of the sunlight (a resin printer should be protecting its resin from ingressing light). At another Maker Faire weeks later, when they were indoors, it wasn’t printing because the table shakes too much.
I recall Makibox and Craftbot were also selling retail before fulfilling all the backer units.