We were told about the thread and wanted to join and answer questions and address issues.
During 2014 we launched a new business with lofty goals, to take on the established vendors and bring a high value and high quality product to market. In hindsight we took on too much, during kickstarter we ended up with 85 different reward levels to accommodate all the requests from the supporters, this lead to way too many sku's and lead to delays, the suggestions were good, our ability to deliver on all of them was not, so apologies again to all the initial supporters who ended up getting their rewards significantly after our target dates.
We definitely had our learning lessons in terms of shipping, we've repackaged and changed how we ship products to avoid any scratching if you order false bottoms, we've shipped a bunch of products successfully into Europe recently and had good feedback.
We've also changed the design around the HLT HERMS coils and the false bottoms, listening to feedback and changing suppliers and designs to get to a better place. The coils are much tighter and sit just above the ball valve and if you have one the electric element, so less water is needed to cover them. As we've discussed a number of times getting tri clovers double sided into kettles of this size is a huge problem, so going out the side isn't practical with tri clovers, on the commercial kettles you have a lot more real estate to achieve a decent sanitary weld that's not available at the bottom of a 10 gallon kettle.
We're working on our communications, they have been poor in some cases especially where we were handling exceptions that the initial system we used didn't track well, we had been overwhelmed by the demand, and frankly the 101 ways everyone can communicate with a supplier (This forum being just one example) and apologize that we didn't do a better job and caused some frustrations, we've installed a new CRM which you access thru the web site and we're working on getting quick answers to everyone's questions.
We're going to be updating the web with new product status this week, the long awaited dip tubes are going to be added along with a number of new tri clover fittings. Check out
www.bru-gear.com
Thanks to all of our early supporters for your patience, we're going to be at NHC so feel free to stop by and see us and let us know how we can get better.
Cheers,
Phil