My two cents
Some factors when it comes to delays.
-Labor-manpower
-Raw materials(I'm pretty sure they're not the only ones who need plastic sheets) especially coming from the largest manufacturing county in the world.
-scheduling. It's naive to think Anovos is the only company using the manufacturing facility (I'm guessing somewhere in or around Xiamen.) If Anovos needs to make 200-300 sets of armor kits and offer $. But in comes Sony or hasbro wanting to farm out work offering $$$$$. Who would you choose as a priority? In reality it's about the cash.
-The vacuum form tooling. This was probably good for a few runs. But during a high volume due to kits vs ensembles, the tooling may need adjusting(depends on the material they used). If there are pull issues, as the owner, I'd rather have them do it right rather than ship bad product. When the unhappy customer wants a bad pull replaced, then what....send more of the same bad product? Imagine the cost of having a bunch of parts that need to be reordered from China on a sea container. Drayage It'll cost the company 10X the original cost.
Black Friday US- the biggest shopping weekend of the year. Production for EVERYTHING like the thousands of tvs, gaming consoles, and toys had started months ago(higher volume more recently). This affects the labor, scheduling, material.
Then again......
It also could be just as simple as not transferring the deposit to the Chinese bank or not follow up on production. Email email email
At the same time, you are the customer. You paid "X" amount. You are literally entitled information. Just have to know what questions to ask.
When I purchase from vendors, you're damn right I hold them accountable.
*not defending them. Just stating info from experience.
This does not apply to efx scout.
building a helmet complete opposite of industry standard operation.
If if I understood the website correctly...
build a helmet using 5 parts of white abs based on the original molds. . Then gluing, puttying, sanding,primer, sanding, primer, sanding to make it look like it's one piece
Then sent to the finishing dept to get painted to look like white abs again.
shop supplies, sundries.etc. throw in the weathering, they're not gonna make a whole lot off of each bucket.
A single helmet could take days. Labor for one helmet...yikes. Starting to look like they may have used up all the deposits and full payments just for start up.
then again, I could be wrong about all of this. Just sayin
