One year later…

Hello,

I am Lorenzo and I am the inventor of the Liberty Mouse Mover.

So here we are one year later.  It has been a real privilege to be here for the many customers that enjoyed owning and using the Liberty Mouse Mover. On March 6, 2018, we launched the product on Amazon. A year later, we are Amazon’s Choice!

We are very grateful to our customers and to Amazon for making us the number one product in this category.   We have 4 starts in our Amazon ratings and we are shooting for five!  I believe we will get to 5 starts this year, but its not going to be by just sitting on our hands.  It is going to take effort at responding to customer feedback, and commitment to making the product better. Here is what we learned from our first year on the market:

1) Take care with packaging

We did the right thing from the start in selecting a nice, hard cardboard, glossy coating cardboard box.   The product looks very slick in there. But the stiff cardboard makes the package a bit harder to keep closed. So we chose to put these little round clear plastic circles across the closed edges. They are called “wafer seals” and they are supposed to keep the box closed. (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=wafer+seals&ref=nb_sb_noss_2).

But what we didn’t realize is that the wafer seals that we used were not large enough, not sticky enough, and they did not keep the box closed most of the time. We learned that by way of an unusually large number of complaints that the “product arrived in an open box and was likely used”.  Well, we don’t re-sell used product, and when the returns came back to the shop, it became clear what the problem was. After a few days, the wafer seals peeled off from one end and the box lid popped open.  What a nightmare!  We had way too many customer complaints simply because we picked a wafer seal that was too small for the job.  So we quickly changed to a bigger, stickier wafer seal, and we got no more complaints about “selling a used product”.

Once that inventory made it through the pipeline, the complaints diminished and the good reviews now dominate.  I can’t help but think that if we had the right type of wafer seals from the outset, we would have been Amazon’s Choice a lot sooner!  

2)  Listen to feedback, improve the product. 

But there was another, more important product issue that I wish we could have solved sooner. “NO ON/OFF SWITCH!” During product testing, we didn’t think a switch was necessary because the product is intended to sit there in the background and be ready to receive the mouse. We figured that if it had a switch, the user might quickly run off and forget to turn on the unit, defeating its purpose.  Also, we wanted to keep the price low, so hence no switch. But the customer is always right!  Too many complaints about no ON/OFF switch.    

So TA DAA! Drum roll please….  One year later, almost to the day, we are introducing the next generation Liberty Mouse Mover!  It has an ON/OFF switch, and it also has a textured platform, rather than the previous smooth one, so as to better reflect the light signal from the optical mouse, and hopefully prevent the occasional mouse from not sensing the rotation.  We wanted to distinguish the new product visually from the original, so the new one has a blue platform, rather than the original red.  I hope you like it!

Sadly, though, the original red and black mouse mover is likely to be discontinued, in exchange for the new one.  Hey, Apple doesn’t sell the iPhone 5 any more either, right?  So once the current inventory of the original F1 (red and black) Liberty Mouse Mover is gone, we will be selling only the second generation F2 (blue and black) Liberty Mouse Mover.  We hope that the Amazon star ratings will continue to go up, now that we have an ON/OFF switch and the new textured platform, and we hope that more customers leave us great reviews on Amazon!  Talk to you soon!

Lorenzo.

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