Hey Everybody!
First I want to thank all of you who have supported us for the past year or so that we have been operating Innovyx. This has been a fun, exhausting, frustrating, and incredibly rewarding learning experience for all of us.
We'll do proper introductions at a later time, but for those of you who do not know, my name is Travis and I do all of our product design and order fulfillment, and probably half of our customer service interactions.
We started this as a small, fun idea to help subsidize any downtime we had in our printing & prototyping business that we had been running the past few years, not realizing the journey we'd go on and becoming part of an incredible community of enthusiasts of swiss army knives, and EDC as a whole!
Fast forward to a year and 5 months later, we've released various versions of plus scales for 84mm and 91mm Victorinox swiss army knives, and scales for 58mm too! There remained an obvious gap in our lineup, though, and so back in August we decided to commit to making plus scales for the 111mm Victorinox models.
This begs the question - Where the hell are they?
To be transparent- I posted on our Instagram the photo of the 111mm that we purchased to do the development on, claiming in the caption we'd should be releasing these back in September. I grossly overpromised as it turns out and this project has been derailed several times due to various circumstances.
The primary reason for the delay has largely been down to my own time. Innovyx is not any of our full time jobs and I run this out of my apartment's spare bedroom during the evenings and weekends. I have worked in manufacturing and logistics for my entire working life, all of which gets pretty intense as we enter the Fall season every year. It never seems that bad going in, but this year things kicked off much earlier on the logistics side and I have been bailing water since.
Despite overwhelming positive reviews and feedback for our scales, there were various issues we identified through this Summer that we wanted to tie up and get our product slate cleaned. Some of these were things we'd received customer feedback on, whilst others were small details that would potentially translate to 111 if I didn't take the time to fix them now on 91mm or 84mm scales that we offer.
Also, as silly as this will sound in particular, the shape of 111s compared to the smaller sizes meant we had a substantial increase in design dependencies to consider for a quality fit and finish. All of this is solvable with time and focus, but most did not become that apparent until I had really begun the work on these which was after I had claimed that we'd release in September.
So what's the plan then?
I decided that given the compression of my available time through the holidays, we'd focus on clearing out our list of various smaller releases that were things we had in development that I had originally subsided for 111mm. While it would be great to just sprint these out the door, I want to make sure this development process is given the time and respect it deserves, as well as ensuring that we do not launch them with a backlog of other projects we really should have had done much earlier.
Here's what we plan to have done over the next couple weeks to set the stage for 111mm's release. This list is not entirely comprehensive but all of these are of high-enough confidence that I am comfortable announcing them.
91mm Pocket Clip Scale Design Update - Available Now
- We've not updated a lot on the site yet for this, but a (completely understandable) point of feedback we've consistently received on the pocket clip scales is that it'd be great to have the design you chose on that side too, as opposed to it just being blank. In hindsight, I should have just resolved the issue with this prior to launching the pocket clips altogether.
Carbon Keychain Clip Singles - November 12th
- We realize that the pocket clip is not for everybody, in fact we've been told it is 'heresy' a few times now to put them on a swiss army knife! Our keychain clips are a great, cheap alternative if you still want some retention but would prefer the knife to be suspended. However, we've only offered them as 5 packs up to this point. You should see these offered in Black, Gray, and Green, live on the store Tuesday.
84mm Topo Plus Scales - Estimated November 18th
- Another version of "why did it take this long?". The answer lies mostly in that 84mm scales are incredibly tedious to make compared to 91mm scales, and Topo is probably our most difficult-to-make repeatedly design that we offer currently. To combine the difficulty of these together was a challenge but it really bothered me that we still hadn't had these done. We're just about there though and I expect these to be live starting next week.
We do have one totally-new design in the works for both 84mm and 91mm that I do not want to publicly dive into just yet, but it was one we wanted to release for the holidays last year and ended up deciding that we should wait until multicolor scales were an option. HallowHex was a precursor to this as our first offering of multicolor scales, and these will also be a limited seasonal offering.
111mm Plus Scales - Estimated January 3rd
- I do not want this to linger too long and I am excited to start sharing the progress made on future updates to this blog. Some people have also asked us if we will open up pre-orders for 111mm Plus Scales. We're not sure yet, and my main reservation is that I want to be sure that we are far enough along and happy enough with the quality of both fit and finish, before I feel comfortable accepting money for any pairs.
We believe these will be worth the wait!
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If you made it this far, thank you for reading and we appreciate your support greatly. I will be releasing these as often as I have progress to share and we'll dive deeper into the development of 111mm scales in particular!
We do always love to hear from you so please email us at support@goinnovyx.com if you want to connect, or DM us on Instagram and Facebook too!
Thank you!
Travis
