The following is a guest post by Al Briggs, who I’m working with so that we can produce and dispatch Emergent Task Planner pads from within the EU. He’s a UK software developer who lives in Germany, and he’s been gracious in shouldering the burden of handling European production and fulfillment. Here’s Al’s status update on the project!

Guten Tag und Hallo aus Deutschland!

I thought I should introduce myself and provide a quick update for those of you interested in ETP pads for the EU. I have been working with Dave for a while on this idea and although it has not been as quick as we would have liked, we are making progress and should begin shipping in the next few weeks.

We have had 39 pre-orders so far. This is not as high as expected but we have decided to move forward with the project and hope that there is enough interest out there that we don’t lose money on the endeavour! :-)

As we have looked into the logistics of how to provide the pads we have made some changes from our initial ideas. Initially I had thought the simplest method would be to put the pads on Amazon UK and get Amazon to handle storage and shipping of the pads, but the truth is that this would only become economical if sales volumes were going to be quite a bit larger. I had also assumed that because the pads are currently only available in English that the bulk of the orders would come from the UK and it would be simpler (and cheaper) to do the dispatch etc from the UK. The pre-orders so far though are split 47/53 between the UK and other EU countries and I had been expecting something more like 80/20.

This means that we have decided to dispatch the orders from here in Germany. It gives us a little more control on how things work initially and also means that we can check the quality of every pad that is sent.

The prices have had to change slightly because we will now sell them in Euros instead of Pounds and the prices are:

• €9.99 for a single 50 sheet pad
• €21.99 for a triple pack of pads

I hope you agree that these are still very good prices.

Dave and I are talking about implementing a new website something like eu-market.davidseah.com to sell from in the future. For those who have already placed pre-orders, we will contact you via email once we are ready and send electronic paypal invoices so that we can quickly dispatch your orders.

Part of making the decision to ship from Germany involved reviewing the costs of postage from here to the UK and other EU countries, and I have good news to report on this front. We can ship inside Germany for €1.45 for a single pad and €4.10 for our triple pack and for the rest of the EU this is €3.45 for a pad and €8.60 for a triple pack. These prices are exactly what Deutsche Post charge us and will therefore be subject to any changes they might make.

The major problem has been to find a printer who can print the pads at the quality level that Dave expects, at a reasonable price (for relatively low volume orders) and who we can work with easily. We are in the final stages of working with a printer and just waiting for a final quote for an initial print run of 250 pads. I expect that this will all be finalised next week and the pads should be printed and with us shortly after that.

If you haven’t pre-ordered yet – please place a pre-order – otherwise I will soon be in contact via email to those of you who have already expressed an interest.

Any questions please email me at al [at] albriggs (dot) com.