Hondo Garage's New Thing

I hear you! My challenge is converting the wife. She is feeling the same pain but thinks that a new 'hood would be an acceptable fix.

Keep up the good life!

 

Good luck and I sure will.

 

Have been on the fence for awhile and this morning decided YES. Went to put my reserve in only to find the price increased by $700 for my XL to $6,950. With the options I want that would put me over $8k. Now have to decide again...

 

$6,450 for the regular, and out until May 2020.

 

Oh shit. Non-XL:

It looks like the price for the windows dropped?

That does put me out. The dream was fun while it lasted, folks.

Demand is certainly, exceeding supply by a huge amount.

 

Same cost for windows. Although they are rapidly approaching Drifter and AT Overland prices. Considering that doesn't inlcude shipping I think it would be out of my budget now. $5k shipped pre-order paid off . Hopefully the increased pricing means future customers don't have the customer experience I did (they made things right, but it cost them nearly 50% of my preorder pricing for their errors).

 

Anybody selling a reserved spot at the 5750 price for the non-xl? Wish there was a little notice of a price increase coming.

 

Ill 2nd the early buy paid off. I had a good experience but got in on the $5,000 price point also. I picked mine up and took a tour and chance to talk with Graeme and others involved in manufacturing. Early bird gets the GFC at a bargain I guess

 

Thanks for that. For whatever reason, I thought it was $250 or $350 for them.

The folks that pre-ordered are looking smarter all the time.

For me, I think it is time to warm up the topper search unfortunately.

 

Price rising, lead times not getting better. When do the ACH payment discounts begin?

 

Always stirring shit...


If my lead times were out that far I would raise the prices too. Looks like they've sold 600 of these. Leads times aren't getting longer because they're failing to produce.

Comparing their success to others criminal activity seems more than slightly unreasonable.

 

+1 on the notice! Kind of came out of nowhere!

 

I had nothing but the best experience when Graeme was dealing with orders and questions early last year. When Elise took over is when things went south. That said when I met with Ross I had the same experience as with Graeme, and Mike the delivery guy is the man. Well worth the price in my book, just took a lot of bitching and frustrations to finally arrive as ordered.

Supply/demand is just dictating the new price point. I knew early on well what it would be worth and the pre-order was certainly a steal at the time. On that note the Drifter also has increased from $6,500 to $7200. Seems both parties didn't estimate labor costs or supply chain costs accurately in the beginning...mix that with tariffs....

 

Orders are coming in faster then they can produce. That's the main point here. Who's got the graph showing sales figures growing faster than production? They will never catch up if the current figures remain the same, which may be one of the driving factors in the price increase.

The argument about production rate is entirely separate. Maybe they could expand productions, or maybe they could work more efficiently, but they're producing what they can regardless of sale figures. As others have shown, that rate has been fairly consistent, aside from a few noted exceptions. GFC has mentioned all the time in here about increasing production, so obviously that is a area of improvement they're trying to work on. But just expanding in a rush is a poor business decision. They need to figure out how to work as efficiently and effectively as possible first. My point was, they are still working on it, and getting these out the door. Not pulling a pelfrey and sitting on inventory while collecting more money.

Priorities not in order? Seems like their marketing is working based on their sales figures. Can't sustain a business if you don't sell anything, so it seems silly to blame their marketing efforts for causing any problems. Haven't heard much on communications recently, that has been lacking in the past.

Fate? That's up to them and how they manage, with no comparison to the fate of other companies.

FWIW, I paid full price for my GFC, and had my own complaints about them too, but I'm looking at this from a business perspective. GFC is an a very good place IMO assuming they manage production, exceptions, continued sales, and especially cash flow timing of all the deposits and final payments alongside production. That's probably what killed the businesses you seem to be referring to, or not selling over $3m of product to begin with.

 

Give them a call today with money in hand, plead your case and and maybe they'll let you in at the old price.

 

I would think tariffs more than anything. It’s effected my work a ton over the last year. But I agree with @t.hornstra on the photoshop thing.

12 people on their photo editing staff? Seems a little overkill. As a consumer, I personally would rather have more hands cranking out product and reducing lead times rather than satisfying the Internet with a hashtag.

Just my .02

 

That is a very good thought, but if only I was ready to push the button. The budget is not 100% there at the moment, so I don't want to bother them.

It is all good. I will enjoy seeing pics of folks enjoying theirs.

The money factor on my end will certainly be better down the road.

 

They have done a GREAT job marketing, no doubt. But if you put a huge emphasis on advertising and selling, while not reducing lead times and increasing production, doesn't that effect new and potential customers?

 

Depends on how you define 'effect'.

As long as they're accurately quoting lead times, and potential customers know that going in, I don't see a problem.

 

that was a joke It's just me, and I don't sleep. My son is 2 months old, which is part of that.

FWIW, I'm now in charge of communication, shipping and sales/marketing. Wiley oversees manufacturing and design.

Existing customers usually talk to Torrey. We have two employees in customer service (again, just me and torrey), 17 in manufacturing, and two in shipping. That should pretty well define the priorities.

Regarding production rates, pay attention to the leaderboard. We spent the last couple of weeks revising final assembly processes and training 5 new employees. Production slowed as we tooled up for increased manufacturing capability. With any process like this, results weren't immediate, but we are cranking through builds right now and have no intention of slowing that down. We stay conservative with long term estimated production rates as well and plan to be caught up to previously estimated timelines very soon. We aren't willing to compromise quality for speed.

We are always available to chat via our website (new chat icon on the bottom right) or you can reach us via email at support@gfcengineering.com. We have a 24 business hour response time on all existing customer inquiries, and typically manage about the same on general sales inquiries.

We eliminated the phone number from our site because we were too busy to answer the phone as much as folks were calling. The call back button does indeed work, it just isn't as quick as email, as I can email you at 3 in the morning but you probably won't answer the phone at that time.

There is no doubt our customer service was definitely lacking a few months back, and we took your feedback to heart and really turned it around. I appreciate everyone's patience who was an early customer, and I hope that you guys are seeing active improvements. We don't plan to stop improving in that department either.

Feel free to reach out to us via email at any time. We are too busy managing employees and building product at the moment to monitor TacomaWorld as often as we have in the past, but we always want to make sure you have a good way to reach us.

Regarding price increase, we are booked until May of 2020 for start dates. It is irresponsible of us to promise current pricing that far in the future should something like additional tariffs or component costs continue to rise. Additionally, staying at our current pricing hampers innovation should we choose to add functionality to the product that increases unit cost.

-g