If you pay this kind of money
If you pay this kind of money purchasing from a large company it would be more surprising to have any little thing slip past, but it still happens. We are a very small company, we each wear multiple hats, and we must always prioritise our tasks. As a result, we are not the right company for some folks, and we happily accept that when its the case. What we are trying to do is push the envelope of what cycling can be, and that is the principle measure we judge ourselves on. We want to change cycling for ever, and so our R&D cycle is high, which means smaller production quantities and frequent new specifications to verify and do quality control on. That is the price of developing stuff no one has done before. If you want the benefits of that R&D focus, you must accept its limitations also. As a case in point, what do I do today? - do I make a new quality control instruction to the factory, or put that aside till I get more customer feedback and instead work on next year's new product release, a product that has never been commercially released. What would folks have me do? That is the reality of it, we have the products we have because we prioritise time to R&D. Maria's RAAM is no different. That goal absorbs an enormous amout of time and effort; but it creates R&D objectives that when solved will put real solutions into customers hands that today arn't even in anyone's imagination.
Customer involvement with how new products hit the ground is part of our path to our goal. We want to create a fabulous customer experience right out of the box, but when delivery of these new products is not letter-perfect we don't beat ourselves up over it and don't accept others doing so. What we do instead, is work with the customer. Even for owners that never purchased from us, and with whom we have no actual business relationship, we have taken that approach. I think that is a far better way to go. The goal is to make it work and so we work hard to resolve issues that can and do arise.
