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A comment on Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders. Parent comment

Re:Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre... by vkou on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:37PM (#14161863)
There are alternatives to what they've done. They could have opted to not use the pre-order money to fund their operations (Until more funding could be secured). They could have protected it, as soon as they realized that they are in deep financial trouble. Compare this story to that of Lily - where when the party ended, it seems like the company has plans to give customers partial refunds. [1]

Instead, from all external appearances, they did everything they could to do right by themselves - not their customers.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/2/28/14766780/failed-drone-lily-...

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Re:Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre... by icelancer on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:07PM (#14162003)
>They could have opted to not use the pre-order money to fund their operations

Exactly. Sequestering pre-order money - at least some fraction of it - should have been one of the first orders of business for any company who cares about integrity.

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Re:Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre... by pjc50 on Friday April 21, 2017 @04:56AM (#14164005)
People talk about this as customers, but: surely the point of pre-order money in many cases is precisely to fund operations - to provide the working capital needed to do manufacturing?

If I have a hardware product that costs $80 to make (x10,000) and I'm selling it on Kickstarter for $100, are you saying that after taking in a million on kickstarter I should just sequester it and then find a spare $800k to do the actual manufacturing?

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Re:Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre... by mathgeek on Friday April 21, 2017 @07:01AM (#14164468)
The key difference here is that the manufacturing never actually happened. They seem to have used preorder money to fund other steps in the process but never actually made the product beyond some initial devices.

Kickstarter to fund manufacturing should happen at the appropriate time in the process, if you're "doing it the right way."

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