Be honest. You’ve seen seen Stagg EKG on Instagram feeds for the past three months, shaken a fist at the screen, and said, “Grrrr…Fellow, where’s my EKG+?” Trust us, the EKG+ delay stung— we wanted to ship it out just as badly as you wanted to receive it. Unfortunately, the last checkboxes to be checked came down to safety regulations, and they were out of our control. Sometimes we wanted to shake our fist at the screen and say, “Grrr…safety, who needs you?” But alas, we drank a cup of coffee, calmed down, and realized safety is very much needed.

We spent the holidays away from home and our families in China and Taiwan to ensure we were making progress every single day. I was there for 10 days at the end of December while our other engineer, Neil, spent seven days in the factory in early December. The first hold-up we were working through was a product modification for the EKG+ to pass the safety certification. This was the addition of an “enable/disable” feature for Bluetooth as required for ETL product certification by Intertek (the governing body for electronic product safety). We’re happy to say this feature was recently completed (thankfully achieved through a menu in software and not as an additional switch), and EKG+ was re-submitted for ETL certification.

The second hold-up was out of our hands. Being a wireless product, the EKG+ also needed an “FCC ID” number from the Federal Communications Commission. We have been sitting and twiddling our thumbs for the past five weeks anxiously waiting to hear if we received the FCC ID and ETL certification…

Well, I’m happy to report that we received the ETL certification last week, and this weekend we received notification that our FCC ID number has been created and assigned!

What does this mean? This means we went into production on Monday, January 22. Boom! Over the past month, we worked to get all parts necessary to build EKG+ delivered to the factory so once the FCC ID was granted we could start assembly immediately. I’m also happy to report we have fully tested the Bluetooth functionality with Acaia, and everything is working well. The Acaia Brewbar app is functioning and days away from completion. The UI looks great, and we know you’re going to love it.

Given our production capacity, we can complete all of the Kickstarter and web pre-order EKG+ units in one week. A pre-shipment inspection by a third party quality control inspector is already scheduled for Monday, January 29. Once everything has been inspected (need to make sure you’re getting the quality you expect) the units will be loaded on a container ship the week of January 29.

Please keep in mind that the long transit time to the United States (nearly a month) means EKG+ will hit our warehouse in Oakland, California at the end of February. Then, we’ll bust our butts to ship each unit out the door ASAP.

In the next couple of weeks look for a survey to collect addresses.

If you have any order-specific questions, please drop us a line at hello@fellowproducts.com.

Jake and the Fellow Team