Yesterday, we sent out an email with 24 hours notice of availability. Today at 9pm, we hit the go button, and...with 2,500 people waiting, it was inevitable that 50 watches would be claimed rather quickly. Though honestly - we never guessed in our wildest dreams that it would take less than three minutes - thank you all for your support.
If we could do it again - we would definitely not have made the 17.01 limited, but we of course confirm there will still only ever be 150 of each dial in total. Though we feel very bad for not being able to satisfy everybody, a commitment is a commitment and we highly value integrity. With any new brand, there's a very high risk of getting it wrong and having thousands of items stuck and unsellable - understandably, this was something we wanted to avoid.
Here's what happens now:
- 17.01s ordered tonight will be packed and shipped over the course of the next five or so days (there's yet another public holiday in between, so please give us a little more time than usual) - and those who ordered will receive DHL tracking info as soon as we have it.
- There will be one final batch of 50 watches (25 of each) expected to arrive end-October; we will do the same thing again and give 24 hour notice before the watches are available to purchase.
- A few people have emailed saying that they were unable to complete checkout either due to cards being rejected or timeouts. The card limitation is most probably due to automatic antifraud measures against online transitions imposed by your bank; we suggest calling them beforehand to ensure there are no such measures in place on your account. As for timeouts, our store uses Shopify and Paypal enterprise on the back end precisely so that bandwidth isn't an issue.
- We have also been told that if payment is not completed fast enough, items can disappear from the cart - this is a parameter that's set by default by Shopify which we are trying to extend, though everyonline merchant works the same way: goods are still available to other shoppers until payment is processed. This is to avoid abandoned carts and stock management issues. The reason it's become an issue here is because there were a lot of people trying to buy few items - this is normally not the case, of course.
We have one more announcement planned for this year, which will not be a 17-series watch, and another watch in the 17-series in the next 12 months. We can't say too much more for now other than a) both watches won't be limited, and b) the 17-series watch won't just be a 17.01 with some minor cosmetic tweaks.
- MT