MVP Lab Report – July 2021
Hey GYROnauts!
I am excited to bring you this long overdue July 2021 edition of the MVP Lab Report. I’d like to touch on a multitude of topics in this report because it has been awhile since we have done our last report. My previous report provides insight on the ERP Changeover and our ongoing efforts to expand production capacity. In this report, I’d like to provide an update on those topics as well as some other developments in the works.
The new ERP System remains an essential part of our ongoing growth efforts and provides us with significantly more real time Sales and Inventory data. This has allowed us to more effectively schedule production according to dealer demand. With the previous system, this data was much more limited. It often resulted in dealers only receiving a fraction of their order, and missing out on many items. With the real-time data of our new system, we’re able to immediately adjust our production schedule to meet all dealer orders.
The ERP system is a highly customizable software, which has provided us the functionality we needed to achieve this level of growth, however, custom softwares like this do mean there will be some bugs, and we will continue to work through them. We greatly appreciate the patience from all dealers as we continue to refine this system for effective order and inventory management.
The products from the latest release were produced prior to James Conrad’s World Championship Victory, so the release outsold expectations by a significant amount. However, we were able to pivot our production and we have been able to produce more inventory to meet the current wholesale orders. The massive outselling of stock did require us to fulfill many wholesale orders in multiple shipments based on the availability of product, but we will be able to ensure dealers will receive almost everything that they ordered. We originally anticipated the June 28 release to require up to 6 weeks to fulfill, and so far we’re on a good pace to have most orders fulfilled within this target window. We will be just a couple weeks behind this schedule due to the explosion resulting from the Conrad Victory.
We understand that 6+ weeks for a product release cycle isn’t an ideal timeline, so we have been forced to adapt and will continue to find new solutions for a release cycle that meets this new extraordinary demand. Therefore, we are testing a new “Wholesale Pre-Order” model that allows dealers to pre-order new products well in advance of their release. This enables us more time to produce the hundreds of thousands of discs needed to fulfill dealer wholesale orders. It is our mission to allow everyone to have equal access to our products without having to pay scalper pricing. Therefore, many of our recent releases have been available to dealers in UNLIMITED quantities. We will explain later in this report what additional efforts we are taking to further expand our production capacity.
How many discs from the May Restock Release (Octane, Reactor, Relay, Photon, Fireball, and Insanity) were available for dealers to order?
All Items were UNLIMITED.
How many discs from the June Release (Hex, Tenacity, R2 Neutron, Reactor, Lift, Pyro, Deflector, Ion, Nano, Signal, Envy, Nitro, Matrix, Volt, Octane, Photon, Proxy, Crave, Relay, Fireball, Panic) were available for dealers to order?
Many Items were UNLIMITED.
How many Conrad Envy and Nomad were available for Dealers to Pre-Order in July? UNLIMITED.
We hope that the increase in available discs has been evident at your local store. All stores that ordered in the last release should be receiving their order in the next few weeks (if they haven’t received it already).
While we have been able to offer many items in unlimited quantities, we’re still struggling to have ALL discs available in our lineup. While we have achieved our goal of 500% increase in production capacity in one year, it still isn’t enough to keep up with the demand. We now have to set the goal post even further, and determine how we’re going to reach a 1000% increase in production capacity in the next 12 months.
For starters, we’re excited to announce that we have officially started a warehouse expansion project that will add 82,000 square feet to our facility. This will allow us the operational space needed to bring in more machines for further production capacity. This construction project is estimated to go well into 2022, so that is the tentative timeline for our next mega expansion. We will surely be providing more details about this expansion in future lab reports.
Setting logistics aside, let’s talk about some other exciting topics: Discs and Plastics!
Neutron Hex – The fan-voted release of 2021 is finally out! I feel this is the perfect complementary disc for our midrange lineup. The mold massacre of 2019 left some big holes to midrange lineup, and we couldn’t be happier with how the Reactor and Hex will be filling the key Straight, Stable, and Neutral lines. This now leaves the understable mid as the largest hole in our lineup, and we’re well on our way to getting them added to our lineup soon as well.
Neutron Paradox and Uplink – These will be our new introduction to the understandable midrange lineup. I can’t say too much about these two models specifically, yet, but they will be available sooner rather than later. We are hoping to have an UNLIMITED release of one of these models in 2021. The other will be released in a special manner this year. That’s all I can say for now 🙂
R2 Neutron – This is our first big step in making a more environmentally friendly product. It is made of recycled plastic from a history of scrap discs. As we transitioned to our in-house production, we have continued to raise the standard in the quality of our discs, and therefore many discs don’t make the cut as first quality. Therefore, these scrap discs undergo a grinding process to make the disc in pellet form for Round 2 reprocessing.
Why is it a black core with a white rim?
The black color is the result of many colors of disc being blended together. Many MVP Discs with a black rim go through the R2 Neutron recycling process, and therefore, the black color is dominant in the blend. While all colors of discs are included in his blend, it is naturally a dark gray color because black is a very potent color pigment in the plastics industry. A minimal amount of additional black pigment is needed to make the core fully black. The white rim was chosen for visibility reasons due to having a black core.
Why is the disc softer than regular Neutron?
R2 Neutron consists of core and overmold material of scrap discs. The overmold in our discs is actually produced with a considerably soft material, although the heavy load of weight filler makes the rim feel firm. This fraction of soft material gives the disc a nice gummy feel, without being overly gummy for practical use.
Does some of the weight filler inside the core of a R2 Neutron Disc detract from the GYRO effect?
Technically there is some more weight in the core of a R2 Neutron Disc, but the amount of weight filler in the core is negligible. There is still a considerable amount of weight in the rim of a R2 Neutron Disc to be considered a GYRO-enhanced disc. The reason this is the case is because the majority of scrap forms from the first molding stage since it is the largest part with the largest surface area. This larger part just naturally has a higher scrap rate and remains the majority component of R2 Neutron.
Will this mean there will not be anymore L2 Discs?
Absolutely Not! We still produce a considerable amount of L2 Discs because of our higher quality standards. The difference between L2 Discs and “Scrap” discs contained inside R2 Neutron is that they have major defects that impact their ability to be used as a disc or meet PDGA standards. L2 Discs conform to all performance and structural requirements, but only have minor defects on them (typically cosmetic in nature). There will certainly be another offering of an L2 Package in the near future. As we continue to expand our production, the variety within our L2 packages will continue to improve greatly.
Fission – Some of you may have noticed there have been some experimental Fission recipes in the latest restock of Fission Photons. We have listened to your feedback about the grip of Fission, and we’re working towards meeting your expectations of Fission.
I want to explain some background on Fission, and the reason Fission underwent the change to 2nd Generation as it did. First of all, Fission has been an EXTREMELY difficult plastic to produce. It has undergone hundreds of formulations and trials, and we’re still working on making an ideal blend for Fission. The early runs of Fission have been very susceptible to consistency issues. The dome of 1st Generation Fission discs had a tendency to be all over the place, and generally too much dome being the case. The feel of the soft gummy plastic was amazing, which is a great attributor to its popularity (on top of it’s extended GYRO-enhancement properties), but consistency in the early runs was very lacking.
The goal of 2nd Generation Fission was to achieve a blend that is more consistent overall, and could be expanded to additional models in our lineup. We have done tests in other models including the Reactor and Octane, and the results are promising in being able to further expand Fission into a larger lineup. However, many of you have addressed the change in grip in the 2nd Generation Fission, requesting that Fission reverts back to the “Gummy” fission with exceptional grip.
That is where 3rd Generation Fission comes into play. The 3rd Generation Fission is still in the very early development stages, but the results are still very promising in achieving the most optimal blend of Fission: Consistent, Grippy, and Ultra-lightweight. We expect that future runs of Fission will continue to have some trials of 3rd Generation Fission within them. The complex nature of Fission requires us to conduct our trials at the production level, which is why there will be a transitional period between 2nd Generation and 3rd Generation Fission.
Eclipse Plastic – Our new 2nd generation glow plastic continues to amaze ourselves with its performance. We’re proud to say it is by far the brightest and longest plastic glow technology in disc golf. We will certainly be expanding our glow lineup in the future. However, it will just take some time due to the extreme demand for disc golf. We’re doing everything we can to keep existing products in stock.
We recently conducted an experiment on a BLUE Glow Eclipse disc. This glow technology is a “Smurf Blue” glowing color. It looks really cool! The one major downside is that this technology does not glow anywhere near as bright or as long as the 2nd Generation Eclipse. We have no plans to make this a standard product because it does not glow as bright as 2nd Generation Eclipse, but we do plan to release some protos in the future for anyone to get their hands on it.
It’s imperative for our 2nd Generation Glow technology to use UV light to charge the glow for best results. Therefore we added a larger 51-LED UV Flashlight to our lineup alongside with our compact 12-LED UV Flashlight. We will also be going one step further with a 100-LED UV Flashlight; this model will be large enough to charge a glow disc with a single pass!
To conclude this report, I want to get your feedback on what you want to see most from our lineup? We acknowledge that the availability of discs in our lineup is still very limited, but we’re working to fix that. Between new models that have been hinted at in the past and models from our current lineup that have yet to hit the production schedule in recent months, what do you want to see most?
That’s everything I have for this expanded version of The MVP Lab Report. I hope that you all enjoyed this report as much as we enjoyed pursuing these experiments.
Cheers!
Brad
