Hi Everyone. It’s been a pretty wild couple of weeks for global trade. We’ll touch on that a little bit later in the update, but in general we’re trudging full speed ahead. For the most part, I want to get your feedback on different packaging design options we have for the Oasis Tables. 

We ran a contest to get a few different proposals for the table packaging, and you can vote on your favorite here. To make shipping more efficient and environmentally friendly, the shipping box doubles as the product packaging. The tables will be shipping in fairly thick corrugated cardboard to ensure safety. The designers did a great job given the limitation of only using black printing on cardboard.

Over the last couple of weeks the tariff rate on Chinese imports has gone from 20% to 54% to 104% and now we're at 145%. We decided to move the table production to Vietnam partially because the country is known for their high-quality furniture production and in part because of the unpredictability of the tariff rates in China.

Over the last couple of weeks the tariff rate in Vietnam has gone from 10% to 46% and back down to 10%. It goes without saying that it’s impossible to plan with this level of volatility so we’re more or less ignoring the noise for now and trudging full speed ahead with production. We are anticipating a slight delay due to the trade war, and we currently expect to ship your tables in June and July. We'll continue to keep you updated along the way. 

New tariffs on nearly every country in the world weren't on our 2025 bingo card, and our team is working around the clock to get your tables to you as quickly as possible without compromising on quality.

On Monday we visited three different furniture suppliers all of whom produced samples for the side tables. Fortunately, they all did a great job, and the samples are even better quality than what we received initially from suppliers in China. You can see some pictures below. We’ll select a supplier this week and then begin producing the beta units for testing before we really ramp things up.  

We also received the first shots from our injection molding tools last week. Injection molding is a great way to make large quantities of very precise plastic components. The downside is that the up-front investment is very high. Injection molding tools are basically the negative or imprint of a component cut out of a very big block of steel.

The tools cost 10s of thousands of dollars, but once they’re ready each part can be made relatively affordably. Injection molding also produces the highest quality parts both in terms of precision and strength. You can see one of our large steel molds below that creates one of the main gears for the tables. 

That’s all for this update! This was a relatively short one, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you think of the packaging designs. By the next update, I suspect we’ll have built the first beta units and be about ready to start delivering those to backers.

As always, the best way to contact us with any order-related questions is via support@grounded.so Our small but mighty support team is always happy to help.