Will they sell 15000? [They did]

The JSON counter is still reachable. However I I’m not able to verify whether it is still updated. Right now it stands at 17604. I’ll check later whether it still works.

Update after 2 hours (at 20:50h): So far the counter has not changed.
Update after 15 hours (at 10:00h the following day): The counter has still not changed. I would be very surprised if not at least one phone was sold and paid since yesterday. I think the counter is completely dead :frowning:

[quote=“Vinni, post:232, topic:9478, full:true”]
We urgently need a “buy now” button somewhere in the shop!![/quote]
Thank you (:

@jftr: I think they just have some more important things to do right now than working with the counter. Maybe they need to work on the solution for an unexpected incident

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Aren’t they producing a batch of ~140,000 units now?
I mean, their cost breakdown (and thus the price) was based on selling 140,000 units. If they would only produce 17,000 units now and produce more based on demand, then they could not reach the 140,000 units and thus had to spread fixed costs over a smaller number of phones and thus the phones should’ve been sold for a higher price. Not only that, it would mean more waiting time for people who order FP2’s after the initial batch.

So my guess is they’re producing 140,000 units in one go.

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I just noticed that the shop front page has an additional line about “Expected Delivery in December 2015”. Special edition buyers might still get theirs in November. IF that is the case, it might suggest that production will not be all “in one go”. In addition, I wonder if the costs of storing 100,000+ Fairphones for several months might outweigh the mass production savings.

Well if they started production in October and started delivering in mid-November, delivered the first 15.000 phones by the end of November than the first not special edition phones would start being delivered in December.
I think it sounds realistic that producing 15.000 phones could take a month, so “in one go” could be a continuous process over months or years right?
Or how many phones a day do you think can be produced? I have no idea to be honest!

The numbers might be similar to the ones of FP1U production like in this blog post… https://www.fairphone.com/2014/07/25/second-batch-delivery-begins/

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I think in a project like this with an entirely new product like the one they developed, they might not want to take the risk of producing a huge batch of phones maybe with the same flaw. I could well imagine that they split their 140,000 phones into 2 or three batches.

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I would assume that Fairphone will deliver in significantly bigger chunks this time. If they would deliver at the speed from back then, the final Special Edition buyers would be served by mid- to late December (assuming optimistically that delivery starts in early November) – but then the current “Expected Delivery in December 2015” for those who buy now would seem already outdated.

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I appreciate hugely what Fairphone is doing, but at the same time I wonder why a company that values transparency so highly has a forum full of people who spend hours and hours fishing for clues at to how the company is operating. Couldn’t one of Fairphone’s 34 employees spend 10 minutes a day communicating with the 17,000 people who have paid up front for a product that seems to be still in the development stage?

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They are searching for someone to do that Job since June:

Hopefully there will be a (new) community manager soon.

I don’t want to tell too much, but I can say that the position of a new (additional) Community Manager has been filled (NO, not by me ;)).

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Go on - tell too much! Transparency rules!

Hey all,

You guys are right - there are some questions to be answered here!

Community manager: yes, from the 1st of November there will be, for the first time in Fairphone history, a ‘real’ fulltime community manager position filled in our company. We obviously are all really looking forward to this person starting and of course there will be a proper introduction here around that time. That is in three weeks already, yay!

The counter: it was taken down for now for a technical reason. The counter was connected to a specific product in our shop; a Fairphone 2 with a black opaque case. Now that we have added the additional four colours, the counter does not give a representative figure of our sales anymore, since we couldn’t add up all the sales for the different color cases. So we decided to take it down for now. I’m not really sure if it will come back, but personally I do really hope so. I’ll try to do some lobbying here :wink:

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@Michiel_S thanks for coming around!
I my opinions that are exatly the information which counts for “transparency” as a main goal of Fairphone!

And as I already suggested in direct mail contacts THIS are exatly these things, which you can post without a lot of additional work within a “micro-blog” or “daily news” section at the homepage.

Besides the nice main “Blog posts” this feature would increase transparency of FP daily business for the community massively - right?

In my opinion no hard facts are neccassary there, on which the community can nail down or blame you if not reached.
Just on what you are working at the moment, why things are done like they are (like the counter etc…), or less important information not needing a own blog post.

This would be your chance to give wrong rumors in the community no chance :wink:
Maybe this could be a work of the now very famous new Community Manager? drum roll

Cheers, Robert

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-1 : Olivier has 2 phones in his right hand, one is a FP2, the other one is an iPhone6!! :smile:
In his left hand (which we do not see) he must have 3 Samsung phones ahah :wink:

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Thanks for the offer :grin:

We know there are issues that need improving on our site and shop. We’ve got digital creative partners to help in this area, but we move so quickly it’s sometimes hard for all of us to keep up.

We’re producing phones on a continuous basis! We talk about in our blog on our 15,000 goal.

“To order the necessary components to assemble the first phones and to generate the income required to ensure continuous production, we’ve set a lofty goal: We want to sell 15,000 phones by the end of September.”

But it seems like the question is - how many phones can be made per month? That I don’t know myself. Hopefully we can answer it in a future blog.

Hey @joekafka. I’m the Online Communications Manager, formerly Community Manager, and I’ve still got a big community heart and am on the forum quite a bit. Last week I was on holiday when this discussion was going on. So I’m here now! :wink:

I understand that people want updates, and we’re working on that. Sometimes the speed of the Internet where people want answers in hours or days is too fast for me to keep up with (yes for now it’s just me, no big online/social media team!).

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll definitely pass them on to the new CM who we will introduce very soon! (He is not employed by Fairphone now so it is a bit premature to ask him to come in and introduce himself)

I understand that some people want more “micro-blogs” or daily updates. We’ve been thinking about it for a long time now, but still trying to find the right system to tell our stories across the whole company. You can imagine it’s quite some work to liaison with different teams (software, mineral sourcing, fair working conditions, e-waste, support team, operations, etc), and turn their daily/weekly work into just a tweet or paragraph size response.

Further, I personally worry that things at Fairphone change so much that it will be confusing for readers if they see one update this week and a contradicting update the next week - or if they miss one week of news. I’ll work with the new CM to think how to update the forum more, which I think is a good place for those hardcore fans who want keep up with our weekly news.

For our latest update on Fairphone news, check out this post:

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You are definitely allowed to go on vacation at some point :wink:
Personally, I dislike the expectations to respond to emails within ours, to publish blogs every day and so on. People expect you to be available 24/7, that you work all the time. The world is only one big hassle. :confused: Guys! Relax!
And thank you for your great post @joe

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@anon90052001 hopefully you enjoied your vacation.
@Vinni As a consumer i like daylie Updates and Blogpost. But i think to excpect an answer or being pissed of because the answer took a while is not ok.

So… WHERE ARE THE PRODUCTION PICTURE :wink:

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A post was merged into an existing topic: December '15 production and delivery thread