How long does it take to ramp up walking pad production?

Lots to share this time: real parts are showing up, the team is growing, I've got the slat color decision from the last poll, and the production plan is finally ready. Let's get into it.

Shipping Address & Color Selection - No Action Needed Yet

Just so nobody worries about this prematurely: I'll ask for your shipping address once we get closer to the actual shipping date. The same goes for the color selection. There's nothing you need to do right now. I'll reach out when the time comes.

One important thing to keep in mind about color, though: the manufacturer of the side elements will initially produce in a single color, and the same applies to the slats. That means the first batch of roughly 100 Office Walkers will all ship in one color, most likely dark brown. Because of this, we won't be able to ship in strictly chronological order, especially at the beginning. I'll explain more about how we'll handle this as we get closer.

Thank You for the Poll and the Slat Color Decision

A big thank you to everyone who took part in the last poll about the semi-transparent slat surface. Your input really helped.

Here's where things landed. The manufacturer has since offered me a new and better UV stabilizer, so we'll most likely try that first and test it thoroughly. If it performs well, that should be enough to keep yellowing in check. I'll keep a close eye on it. And in the unlikely event that yellowing still becomes an issue down the line, I'd offer an additional warranty to cover it.

I also want to clarify a few things that the poll didn't capture well:

• The material I originally showed (the yellowed one) was TPU, whereas production will use TPE, which already yellows considerably less to begin with.
• Switching to the pigmented light gray version could actually cause significant delays. We'd need to go through color matching again, which means rounds of injection-molded samples from the manufacturer (each taking roughly two weeks) and more iterations if the first ones don't match. That could drag on for quite a while.
• With the semi-transparent surface, you can place your own colors or designs underneath, which gives you a nice bit of customization.

For these reasons, my preferred path is to stay with the semi-transparent surface if possible. As long as we can use the new UV stabilizer, I'm confident this won't be a problem.

Backers voted on the slat surface in an earlier Kickstarter update. Want a say in the next poll? Pre-order on Kickstarter.

First Parts Have Arrived

Real components are showing up! So far the deliveries are mainly 10,000 bearings along with 4,000 bolts, nuts, and washers. The quantities don't look like all that much at first glance, but they're surprisingly heavy. The first samples for the crossbeams and a few other parts have arrived too, which I'll be testing soon. And that also means I can finally build some new prototypes again.

The main thing we're still waiting on is the large custom parts, which naturally take longer to produce and deliver. But seeing the standard hardware stacking up in the workspace is a great sign that things are moving in the right direction.

Packaging

The new prototypes tie directly into the next topic. I need to build a fresh prototype to send to the packaging manufacturer. They'll then build a packaging prototype around it and ship the Office Walker back to me inside it giving us a proper, hands-on test of how well everything is protected.

It's good that this is happening now, because the process takes some time. And if everything works well, they'll still need to actually produce the finished packaging afterward.

The Team Is Growing

My first employee starts next week! He'll be working in marketing, and one of his first tasks will be setting up our own Shopify store and getting the whole backend in place. I'm really glad to finally have some support. There's been more than enough to do.

In July, the first employee for product production will start as well. After that, I'll need to bring on one or two more people for production fairly soon.

The Production Plan

Now to the big one. Now that I've received capacity estimates from all our suppliers, I can finally give you a realistic picture of how production will ramp up. I've put together a month-by-month view of how much we'll be able to produce. You can see the breakdown in the image below.

A practical tip for reading the chart: you can get a rough idea of when to expect your own unit by looking at your backer number against the cumulative number of units produced each month (the column at the very right). Once production reaches your backer number, that's roughly when your Office Walker should be in the pipeline.

The gist of it: it'll take roughly 2–3 months to reach full production capacity. The main reason is that the initial shipments of slats are limited, and we have to account for delivery times on top of that.

A big open question is how to best split the shipments. We want parts to arrive quickly, but also keep things cost-effective. The plan right now is to split the initial deliveries into smaller batches shipped by TIR (overland truck transport), which takes about half the time of sea freight. At some point we'll need to transition to sea freight though, since it's significantly cheaper and can handle much larger quantities at once.

What the data clearly shows is that our bottleneck is the production capacity of the slats, and later on the side panels as well. Interestingly, the number of employees isn't the most important factor here. The limiting factor is really the supply of these key components.

A few important caveats. These are still estimates, and the speed at which we can assemble units on our side will also influence the timeline. There are also more levers we can pull if needed. For example, commissioning additional injection molds with more cavities to increase output.

As a rough guideline, this means each wave should expect a delay of roughly 1–3 months. I know that's not the news anyone wants to hear, but I'd much rather give you honest, well-grounded estimates than optimistic numbers that don't hold up. As things firm up (especially once we see how quickly assembly goes on our end) I'll be able to sharpen these estimates further.

That's it for this round. Thanks as always for your patience and for sticking with the project. We're getting closer with every shipment that arrives, and I'll keep you posted!

Johannes

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