July 2024 Manufacturing Update

Hi Instafloss backers!

First of all, thank you to everyone who had printed out their own mouthpiece drain and gave us their feedback. There were some good suggestions regarding exit angle + rounding to make sure it’s more comfortable in the mouth that we will implement, so thank you for this! If you haven’t read the last update and wonder what we’re talking about, you can see a demonstration of The Drain over here. We hope this increases accessibility to flossing even further.

Also, for those of you who opted to receive the early version of the Instafloss, we want to let you know that we now have replacement mouthpieces in stock, should you need them. 

Now, for those of you who have not yet received your Instafloss because you opted to wait until the reservoir valve was fixed, we finally have some good news. While the last few months (and last few updates) have been a cycle of waiting for samples, making change requests to those samples, updating the backers that if these samples are approved the timeline will be about two months, getting the samples back, rejecting them, writing a new update with the news, and repeating the process (much to everyone’s frustration) we have now bypassed this supplier and instead developed a new design (“valve 3.0”) that we can manufacture mostly in house. 

This new design is 3D printed, which allows us to make them ourselves, but also makes the process slower, at least initially (we have plans to increase production speed). However, we can integrate changes better, which we feel is a fair tradeoff. We’re now in the process of doing user testing and we’re waiting on feedback before making any promises that we miss. Once our testers give us positive feedback and this design is approved, we will switch to developing our ability to produce units in large quantities. However, the benefit of this process is that, once the designs are approved by our testers and we begin production in earnest, we can ship pieces as soon as they are complete, rather than waiting for a large batch. Our next update will include the results of our testing, so stay tuned for that.

We feel much more hopeful about this design, because in our own testing it’s proved promising (unlike any of the valve 2.0 samples our supplier has given us).

Thank you again for your patience. We thank both the backers who opted to get their units early and have been providing us with amazing feedback and we also thank the backers who have patiently decided to wait until the new valve is ready. Thanks to all of you, we are slowly making flossing more accessible for all, and we couldn’t thank you enough for your continued part in making this happen.