Designing physical products, and bringing them to life, is a beast. Especially for guys who’ve spent most of their careers focused on digital goods and services.
But it’s truly a labor of love — there’s something special about seeing something that was once a dream arrive on pallets that get dropped on your front lawn (my house is our warehouse).
And it’s beyond rewarding to hear from customers that our products are helping them out as parents. Here’s recent customer Sho on her Fathercraft Bag…
With our second bag, the sling, we wanted to focus on a few things:
- A smaller size. The original bag is big. Intentionally so—as you saw in Sho’s review, kids, especially when there are multiple kids, require an immense amount of stuff. And, we hear from people who use their Fathercraft Bag on international flights, long car trips, and all-day outings. But with the sling, we wante something that was grab-and-go for day trips, errands, and popping over to a friend’s house or the park.
- Affordability. The original bag ain’t cheap. We totally get that, but we weren’t willing to sacrifice features or premium materials in the big one. With the sling, we were able to keep build quality extremely high, but the price will be a lot more affordable because it’s a smaller, simpler bag.
- Thoughtful design inside and out. The feedback we’ve gotten from parents on the first bag on thoughtful organization, features that get used, and styling that stands out from typical diaper bags was instrumental in how we went about designing the sling.
All right, on to the updates…
Final testing is complete. Before we bring a product to our customers, it goes through the wringer. This takes time and money to go through multiple iterations, but we’re obsessed with building awesome stuff. Here’s my daughter Ruby with an early prototype:
And here’s co-founder Mark testing in the Arizona desert:
We’ve found some kinks along the way, and fixed them. Here’s Mark describing an issue with the original quick-release buckle (now replaced with an upgraded buckle):
Production has begun. Our factory, which is in Vietnam, is actively working on the bag. (Thank goodness, for tariff reasons, that we again chose Vietnam over China to make the second bag.) We expect our first production run to complete in early-to-mid May.
Product photography and videography is in flight. Here are a few of my favorites so far…
Pricing update. Again, we are working hard to make the sling as affordable as possible. Tariffs aren’t helping. Inflation isn’t helping. We’re still working on what our retail price will be. BUT, we are ready to guarantee that you’ll be able to get the sling for less than $90 if you grab our early bird pricing tier on Kickstarter. To make sure you can do this, head over to our Kickstarter pre-launch page and click/tap, “Notify me on launch” button, and sign up for Kickstarter updates if you haven’t.
Timing update. We are working our tails off to try and get this bag in everyone’s hands by Father’s Day. We think this will be possible for U.S. Kickstarter backers (though, we, like other brands, are somewhat at the mercy of the state of the global supply chain. We’ll keep you posted!
That’s it for today! We hope you love this sling as much as we do. Questions? Comments? paul [at] fathercraft.com
