The Slow System Pitcher is here! 

Pre-orders are starting to ship out and local Chicago pick up is available this week from our storefront/studio:

▪️Thursday March 14: 12-5
▪️Friday March 15: 11-3
▪️Saturday March 16: 11-3

📍4432 N Kedzie Ave in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, conveniently off the Kedzie Brown Line L stop.

👋 See u 🔜

Here's what's been happening since I wrote you last:

• My order hit the sea right before Chinese New Year!
• It landed in Long Beach a few weeks ago
• The Pitchers should arrive at my studio this week—Wednesday March 6 is the estimate
• Coffee orders, tea orders, filter orders, sticker orders... lots of stuff being ordered
• The shipping survey will be sent out this week

• The survey will be where you give me your shipping address, you will pay for shipping (as I did not collect any shipping fees during the campaign), and you'll have a chance to add on any additional items (like glassware)
• If you are in Chicago, I encourage you to select "Local Pick Up" in the survey. I will announce an "open studio" event when I have the product available to get from my North Side Chicago storefront. If this date happens to not work for you, there will be other "business hours" announced as well.

Just a quick note to share the latest news:

• Production/packing should be wrapping up this week!
• We are looking at booking our freight shipment somewhere between February 7-13
• This likely means the freight will arrive in Chicago in late March!

• I will be preparing the shipping "survey" to go out once the freight is on its way to the US
• The survey will be where you give me your shipping address, you will pay for shipping (as I did not collect any shipping fees during the campaign), and you'll have a chance to add on any additional items (like glassware)
• If you are in Chicago, I encourage you to save the shipping costs and simply come to my studio/storefront to pick up—I will announce an "open studio" event when I have the product in my studio. If this date happens to not work for you, there will be other "business hours" announced as well.

Manufacturing is underway, so I wanted to share a few visuals.

Below you can see the latest two pre-production samples which I received last week. The tweaks and updates to the glass are subtle (for most people) but are completely dialed in now! We were able to kick off glass manufacturing—which is the most time sensitive since it is all done by hand.

The corks are not sealing quite as well as I had hoped, unfortunately. After a few samples that did not quite nail it, I decided to order a bunch of stock corks and see what I could learn. It turns out the softness of the material, the angle of the cork and the slight inconsistency of the handmade glass make a trifecta of variables that I believe are driving the issue. The stock cork on the right fits wonderfully, though—so I was able to use that as a baseline and update the design. I should have new samples to test within a few weeks.

Below is a fun new detail I was dialing in on the glass—a new variation on the Manual logo:

This radial layout plays better on the bottom of glassware, and I'm excited to roll this out across the Manual line going forward! Below you can see the bottom in more detail: the new logo, the glass seal, and a slight indentation in the middle. Like I said, these things are subtle, but the details make the design.

And finally for this visual update: the packaging!

Packaging for glass is always a challenge—how do I protect a fragile object that needs to be shipped around the world—and without using foam/plastic? After years of glass products I'm hopeful I've finally found a way to economically protect the products while not having to mold custom pulped paper packaging (like an egg carton—they look awesome, but the molds can be costly).

If you were curious, I always mock up my packaging and test it out:

Just a reminder of the estimated timeline:

• December-January 2024 - Manufacturing
• February-March 2024 - Shipping from factory to Chicago
• April-May 2024 - Fulfillment of orders