I’ve been on the cirklon waiting list for 27 months (it’s now August 2020). That’s two years and three months.
When I first joined the waitlist it was one year and I received confirmation of my initial date of entry onto that list.
I didn’t reach out to the company for the first 14 months because I understood that the waitlist was a year and they may be running a little slow. When it got to a year and a half I sent them an email. No response. About five emails later I received a response saying that they were coming out with version two and I should be hearing from them within a month or two about my order.
That was a long time ago. They never responded to any email again even when I hit two years, and then 26 months.
I can assure you that if I wanted to make a product and I had the engineering and logic complete, I could get the logistics pipeline going. Part of being a good company is hiring the right people and I think that’s where they failed. The product has been out for sometime and I’ve personally been on the waitlist 27 months. That’s plenty of time to get your ducks in order.
There are many companies making complex products and getting them to market in huge quantities in short time. Elektron, Dave Smith/Sequential, and hundreds of eurorack companies like MakeNoise. Companies like Dave Smith can get the pro three from drawing board to inventory in one year and the last pro three I saw was serial number 2200’ish; and that was during a pandemic…
At some point you have to scratch your head and look directly at the core of Sequentix. They publicly disclose that they’re getting evicted from their offices, and they have literally many hundreds of orders in the queue that they cannot fulfill. They may make a product founded on a good idea and great R&D, but you have to question their ability to actually run the company and hire qualified people that can communicate with the manufacturers and their own customers.
Woo hoo! Big update on the status/roadmap of Cirklon2 shipments & V2 upgrade kit availability, from Barbara on the forums:
“So far we have shipped 40 Cirklon2 machines to customers, and we have another 8 Cirklon2 machines ready to assemble and sell later in August.
I will offer the rest of these units to customers who joined the list in early May 2017.
After those units are sold, the next parts are due to arrive with us in the second half of September, so I’ll be contacting more customers from the waiting list then.
That batch will be 100 new Cirklon2 machines and 50 CK2 upgrade kits for existing Cirklon owners.”
sounds like you’ll be coming up pretty soon though, from what @nilsec posted…
anyway, you’re not wrong. but I do think that the relative value of a $2500 hardware sequencer is pretty different from a polyphonic keyboard, or even a eurorack module. sure, it seems like there’s tons of people online asking for a Cirklon, but the desire is nowhere near as many people who want a Prophet, for example. I think if they ramped up production to bust out even 1000 units a year, they’d quickly exhaust the number of people that are after one. that said… surely there’s a better way to do it than what they have been doing, and it sounds like they’re getting to a better place now.
also: I randomly ran into some of your Reverb sales like an hour before I read your post here and thought: “wait, didn’t I just see that name somewhere else…?”
Also, here is a photo of a Cirklon V2 rear with the serial number of 2003. Companies don’t always use the serial number as a counter of units made, but sometimes they do. Obviously this is a sum total of Cirklons and not just the v2 units.:
yeah, that Cirklon is the third V2. hence the starting 2 serial number (this was discussed either up-thread or elesewhere, I forget). so they sold less than 2000 of the V1.
They sell other things besides Cirklons, (t-shirts, custom installations, exotic synth repair/modification, and synth conversion kits ) also Colin does lots of custom stuff for individual artists.
for example, It’s my understanding a few years back, he went to Richard D James’ house and wired the entire house so Richard could take his Cirklon to any room in his house and play his synths there.
If a synth has a phenomenal midi implementation, you don’t even need to be in the same room as the synth.
None of this matches what they’ve been openly posting?
As the company is a 2 person operation, i am not sure what you’re talking about with “offices”, regardless they changed their supply chain and process to scale better, requiring downtime.
They have a more efficient production flow now to address the orders in-queue, and they’re working quickly to clear the queue out.
Really? See below. Trust me I’m just giving my story and my experience. I have no ill will towards them. But I do have some degree of mild frustration since there are plenty of companies out there getting it done. 2 person operation? HIRE. Hopefully they catch you like you say.
I never read much into the “eviction” thing. there are lots of reasons why you could be kicked out of a property you’re renting. i.e. not necessarily that you’re a negligent renter (and if so, I’d imagine you’d not share this with people you want to give you decent-sized chunks of money)
That sucks. I feel their pain. My current place of employment is getting unexpectedly evicted. Owner of the building sold the building, and told us we would be good, then the new owner comes in and says we have until the end of the lease to leave, and the sooner the better. It’s quite the operation here, and will be be a very expensive move.
I get the frustration. But headcount scaling comes with its own problems, and hiring people does not in most cases get around these sorts of developmental bottlenecks.
Small/“boutique” companies scale at their ability and comfort, and if they’re capable of taking down their primary product for years to do it right WHILE continuing to develop hardware and firmware, i have faith that this fairly recent stabilization of supply chain/BOM/parts even considering Covid, things are finally flowing.
It’s a small operation not catering to the commercial market , probably how they want it to be. A niche product for a niche market for very patient customers.
BTW I assume the price listed on their website is not for the V2, how much is the Cirklon V2 ?
And Berlin is going through a continual gentrification as far as i’ve heard from friends.
Being evicted because the office building is sold is quite different from evicted because you can’t afford rent.
Technically i was not “evicted” recently because the cops didn’t have anything filed but i was “evicted” a few years back because the building i lived in downtown was sold off for “nanohousing” to idk, tech workers or a cult and all residents were forced elsewhere.
