07:55 – FedEx showed up yesterday with the first batch of stuff I ordered to build kit inventory in preparation for our busy time starting in August. This round, we’re ramping up a bit. For example, one of the line items on the last order I made to this vendor was for 100 sets of splash goggles. This order had the same line item, but for 500 sets.
We’re also ramping up batch sizes on stuff. For example, in the past we might make up 30 or 60 bottles at a time of a particular chemical, depending on whether that chemical was included in the biology kit, the chemistry kit, or both. We’ll now double or quadruple those batch sizes, depending on the chemical, the container size, and the kits that chemical is used in.
We’re also in the process of transitioning away from dropper bottles to standard screw-cap bottles. We’ve been using the dropper bottles mainly because they’re “expected”. That is, most science kits use 15 mL or 30 mL dropper bottles, so we did the same. But dropper bottles are more expensive, require more steps (and time) to fill, and are more likely to leak in transit. A few of our kit buyers have reported accidents with them, when they squeezed so vigorously that they popped out the dropper tips. Bottles with standard screw caps are also more convenient to use, enough so that many kit buyers simply pop out the dropper tips and discard them. So it makes sense to forget about the dropper tips and just use screw caps. We have a lot of the dropper bottles in stock, so we’ll continue to use them until we run out of them, but then it’ll be screw caps all the way.