No no no. Do not take snippets of what you read and turn things around and make them into something they are not.
The forwarder was NOT doing what we told them to do, caused us a lot of problems, delays, and loss of our clients. That’s why Philips Projection withheld their payment recently, to force them to get their act together.
Do you think Philips Projection was waiting for all these issues, deliberately withholding your product from you? Philips Projection is in the business of making and selling projectors, not shipping, which is why they contract other companies to do so. Of course it’s the responsibility of Philips Projection to get the products to the backers, and that’s what we’ve all been working really hard on, with a really small team that wasn’t supposed to have these issues at all.
People keep referring to not trusting Philips anymore and such, but how fair is that honestly? We all backed a product long before it was even finalized, let alone produced. We are still making these batch by batch (despite component supply issues along the way), you can’t compare this to any off-the-shelf buying experience you normally have with Amazon or AliExpress. So referring to “ordering in August” or even March this year is simply not the fair or relevant in my opinion, it’s a backing of a product which is not yet even made for most orders when they were placed.
So yes, the factories took a while to reopen, supply lines to deliver, workers to get back up to speed. And finally in early March we could have enough to ship out again. But then the cargo crisis had just begun, and the forwarder started having trouble shipping. Instead of communicating all of this to us clearly, they still issued tracking numbers, and sometimes even made mistakes like reusing tracking numbers which has already been used. For the longest time, we didn’t even realize the actual issues, but as time went by we started to understand and see a lot more of how they were failing us. And we decided to step in and try to find solutions, which is what we had contracted them for in the first place.
We found alternative routes for some (now) problematic shipping countries, looked into other shipping services altogether, and much more. We had about 15000(?) units shipped by this forwarder, and about 5%(?) of the shipments had an issue which perhaps could’ve been avoided. A further 2-3% never even left their premises due to service interruptions etc. And for those we are still chasing other options.
Anyone who’s had a problematic shipment (not just late, but a real problem) would understandably be upset, disappointed, or otherwise annoyed. But to say that you wouldn’t recommend or buy from Philips again, or even go as far as to disrecommend the brand to others, isn’t being fair to Philips I find.
