09:25 – As of this morning, our April 2013 unit sales and revenue are already at 67% of total April 2012 numbers. That makes me nervous, because about 85% of April 2012 sales occurred in the second half of the month, leading into May, when the serious ramp-up started. Extending that out tells me that our ready-to-ship inventory may not be sufficient to last the month.
So I’m madly building more kits, less the parts that I don’t have. For now, that’s 50 mL and 100 mL polypropylene beakers, of which I have 600 each on order, and the thick cavity slides, of which I have 200 dozen on order. Building partial kits is dangerous, because in the past a boxed-up kit was always ready-to-ship. I’ll have to be very careful to label the stacks of semi-complete kits “Missing Beakers” or whatever to make sure that we don’t accidentally ship incomplete kits because we mistook them for finished kits.