What happens when parts arrive damaged?

Finally all parts arrived. The slats, the protective covers, also the feet and wheels in fact. The slats were shipped almost a month ago and the feet and wheels yesterday.

But of course there is a new problem.

The dents

Due to the stacked way the slats were packed, most of them have dents one way or another. Some are not visible from the top, others a bit, and a few have deep dents at the top.

So now it is time to solve another problem. First I will wait for a day and see if the dents recover. But I doubt all of them will, as they have been stacked for weeks by this time.

Why a soft surface is a trade off

The slat covers are made of TPE, a soft touch material. That is deliberate. It is what makes the surface comfortable underfoot and quiet, and it is why you can walk on it barefoot.

The cost of that softness is exactly what you see in these photos. A material soft enough to be pleasant is a material soft enough to take an impression when a few thousand of them sit on top of each other for a month.

A hard plastic surface would have arrived perfect and been worse to walk on.

What happens to the ones that do not recover

Some will spring back on their own once the load is off. Polymers have memory, and given time and room temperature a shallow dent tends to disappear.

The deep ones will not. Those become spares, test pieces, or they go back to the supplier, depending on how many there are. They do not go into a finished Office Walker.

The slat covers are replaceable by design, which is the one thing that makes this manageable. Every cover swaps out individually. So even if a unit developed a mark years from now, that is a part you order, not a machine you replace.

The packing itself

The real lesson is upstream. How parts are packed for the journey matters as much as how the finished product is packed for yours, and it is much easier to get wrong because nobody is watching.

I will feed this back and the next shipment will be stacked differently.

I will keep you updated on how many recover.

Every part is replaceable · Care and warranty · The Office Walker