The SpeedX Leopard and Leopard Pro Kickstarter Campaign closed in April 2016 with 1,251 backers pledging some $2,319,876USD.
In total some £2,567,748 GBP from 1,855 Backers was finally raised, through the Crowdfunding platforms.
Delivery was promised for July 2016. Eventually, the last few bikes, were delivered mid-May 2017.
My own Leopard Pro was delivered at the end of January 2017, many, many bikes were delivered after mine, with the last of the EU bikes arriving by April 2017.
The list of excuses why bikes were not delivered was legendry… I’ve tried to capture the best of them… they are all taken from the Kickstarter Campaign Page.
There were altogether some 42 Updates, with the tone changing from very upbeat on the initial updates, to a real sense of desperation by the end.
I have trimmed down most of the Updates to make them shorter, I have also corrected any spelling / typo errors.
The Updates were written by non-native English Speakers, so they don’t always read very easily.
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April 20 2016 – The first ‘real’ problem they came across was VAT and Import Duty.
“As we working hard building our start-up we stumble upon things which are unfamiliar to us. VAT and shipping was a complete new issue to us.”
EU Import Duty on bikes built in China was 50% plus VAT. To alleviate the costs, they (a) built the bikes in Taiwan for EU countries and (b) helped with the Import Duty and VAT – so for the UK, 15% of the cost was refunded to cover the Import Duty and 20% of the cost to cover the VAT. This would be refunded on sending the Customs Duty Form to SpeedX when the bike was eventually delivered.
May 27 2016 – Pledge Manager, who are a company who collect information from customers on behalf of SpeedX weren’t collecting the information required:
“We apologize for the delay. We submitted everything on time to them and they took way longer than expected. It should take a few days at max for us to send out the survey.”
May 30 2016 – “Yesterday we received a lot of customer enquiries and we’re still working on clearing that. Please be patient.”
Because of the odd sizing of SpeedX bikes, customers were trying to find the best size for them, mainly because of the fixed size of the SpeedForce computer as the ‘stem’.
Another form was sent out to change the stem size.
May 31 2016 – “As for now there is still over 500 uncompleted surveys on Pledge Manager. We suggest you to complete it as soon as possible so we can pass all the details to our factories.”
This is so that the details can go to the factories for the bike frames to be made.
June 6 2016 – “We’ve almost received 1000 completed survey. In order to get our orders on time to the factory we’ll lock down the orders this Wednesday 8th of June. Those we haven’t completed the survey yet – please do so otherwise we cannot promise that your bike will be delivered on time.”
July 13 2016 – “As of last week, all the frames have been produced. The paint is currently being applied on the frame as of this week.”
Middle of July and the frames are just being painted – although delivery was supposed to be in July. They go on to say that we have just ordered other parts – “The other parts have also been initiated: wheels, stem, handlebar etc.”
July 23 2016 – the first signs of problems to come:
“Let’s start first with some bad news. Unfortunately, due to several decisions that we made in terms of (small) design changes and other things like accepting requests to change the stem size the final product will be a bit delayed. The new expected shipment date is now mid of August.”
August 19 2016 – More delays:
“First of all, apologizes for the lack of update. We’ve been busy more than ever. Our ship out time is again a bit delayed due to several reasons:
1. The factory that makes the carbon fibre wheels could not handle all the orders (despite communicating them early on). We searched two other factories to deal with this – however it takes time for them to get up to speed.
2. Some Shimano parts from Japan was stuck at the customs 12 days ago.
By this time, assembly wasn’t expected to finish until late September.
September 22 2016 – An optimistic note at last:
“Dear friends,
After months of waiting, we can finally announce that we’re going to ship out our first shipment today.
In terms of logistics it’s a bit complicated, so there is no clear logical order other than your shipping address:
22/9: Start shipping bikes to orders from Asia countries
28/9: We’ll start the shipping to Europe
Happy Cycling!”
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None of these dates were in fact true – they were a total fantasy – A few early bikes, were shipped out to Asia by November 2016.
Continued with SpeedX Delivery Excuses #2