The "Great Hand Debate" Continued... back to start!

Dear community,

Thanks for all your input, passion and critical feedback. This post likely will be a bit shorter and less professionally worded in English because Landon our "content-master" is spending well deserved time with his family at the beaches of Madeira.

Leaves the job of trying to explain truely unexpected news about our "Great Hands Debate" to Tzuyu and myself (Andi). And it is not just unexpected, it is perhaps the most lucky thing we have experienced along this project.

Intense internal discussions of how to interpret the votes in comparison to the vivid/controversial discussion, has plagued Tzuyu with sleepless nights. Although Tzuyu did pretty much most of the calls for solution finding around this hands problem, she as a perfectionist on the one hand and a manufacturing cost procurement expert on the other hand just could not rest.

Yesterday in the morning it came to her mind that she could call up another expert in the field of working with luminous materials. He is into it since 30 years and known for making the impossible happen. Typically factories with certain scale need color codes and then mix it accordingly along an SOP (Standard Operating Process) There is not much room for playing around which belongs into the realm of R&D. And with lumnious the color codes of pantone & Co do not work very well and it is more about tyring and the amount of aces up on your sleevs when searching for solutions.

So after the call with Mr. Luminous, she went over to his workshop with her baggage full of orange-luminous-problems to figure out if he might have some material combination which comes close to what we have been shown during the early stages of Supersede CGI (Computer generated images).

With a smile he opens a drawer and pulls out this sample below which is a stunning orange luminous drop splashed over a piece of paper.

V4 says pretty much all... he also needed to play around a lot and playing with Superluminova is an expensive exercise. Luckily he did find the "secret sauce" and packed one gramm of the left over orange material combination for Tzuyu to take home and apply on some sample hands.

With a smile she hurried back to the office and sent out the one gram of material to our hands supplier in Seoul, Korea.

Being a design and manufacturing expert with more than 25 years experience Tzuyu can quickly judge on if things work out or if we run into trouble during production. Her smile on her face indicated to me that she is 95% sure that this material combination would likely produce the desired result matching our expectation from the CGI´s we have come up with in the early days of this project.

So what are the implications on the next steps?

Here is a table of what we are looking at right now and before we have not yet received sample-hands back with the magic luminous orange we look at the-state-of-the-second-hand as follows:

This means, in any case we will produce a couple of red hands to satisfy orders.

Tooling for both the hand itself and color mixture red and orange non-luminous have been done already. Therefore, IF... then the "Magic orange" comes along as we hope we will produce the orange hands as originally shown. This means we will skip the orange (non-luminous)only version and very likely we think we all can conclude that we can also skip the Lollipop version, thus saving us time and tooling cost. But as said only IF things work out with the “Magic Orange” if not then we revert back to the lollipop and non-luminous options.

Concerning your order adjustment:

Since we have this new opportunity, please hold back with your order change requests for now and lets wait on this sample hands. Then we will make a next post and a live to make the final call... hopefully 😂.

We have been facing some pretty rough discussions in the background caused by some of the changes we had to do come up with. For us product makers day in and out since 25 years it is a normal journey of countless changes and adaptations between imagination, simulation, sampling and final product. Computers are helpful to get a very good idea by using photo realistic technologies, but they obviously can lead us into a difficult position like in this hands and case debate.

We have decided to make it part of our business model and product development approach to let people become part of this journey of course trying to reduce the visible setbacks for our community to a minimum. But realistically we cannot eradicate them and we also believe it is important to let you as people get insight into a tiny part of the challenges the design and manufacturing team is facing along this journey.

However we understand that some become more emotionally attached than others to some early stage design suggestions, and it can become hard to accept that some changes we present are just in all our best interest and an expected struggle for us day in day out. We always want to reach the best possible outcome and try to give the best we can do so. But sometimes we have to accept trade-offs because there are limitations in our skills, infrastructure or just physics.

So we apologize to the ones which felt some sort of disappointment that we cannot always live up to the motto "what you see is what you get" and we will spend more effort in future to point out potential pitfalls and manufacturing related limitations about our early design suggestions.

So please accept our apologies on that side and we will try to make it more clear in future where we enter the realm of CGI-reality versus manufacturing limitations.

Overall we think we should continue with our open and inclusive style of bringing products to live, because most people not only understand the limitations and changes, but also embrance the journey. This makes us happy and drives us to improve.

Here are more rendered fotos to get the feeling.

We listen and deeply care about your input.

Thank you,

Andi, Tzuyu, Landon and the entire HORAGE team