Hey FRC!
We here at VEX Robotics, a subsidiary of Innovation First International, are excited to be the distributor of official FRC Hatch Panels for Destination: Deep Space! This has been an exciting (and incredibly busy) time for all of us here the last few months as we have been wrapping up production and getting inventory in place at all of our offices around the globe.
That being said, with the community’s recent concerns about inventory availability with FRC suppliers, I wanted to offer a little bit of a “peek behind the curtain” now that everything has been announced. Our hope is that this transparency up front will help ease any concerns that you may have.
As you can imagine, forecasting team sales for a game you know very little about isn’t an exact science, but we used our years of forecasting for the VEX Robotics Competition and the VEX IQ Challenge to help guide us in this process. At the end of the day, we believe that there are enough Hatch Panels sitting in (or in transit to) our warehouses to service all FIRST teams and offseason events for the duration of the season.
We plan on closely monitoring sales in all our offices to determine if we need to re-allocate inventory to prevent outages.
Now for a little deeper dive:
The game pieces for team sales here in the North America (US, Canada, Mexico, etc) were broken up into a few different shipments based on how many our supplier was able to finish in time to catch upcoming vessels departing to the US. This allowed us to avoid hefty air freight costs, keep the cost to teams as low as possible, and ensure that we would have stock before Kickoff. Currently, there are several thousand units sitting in our warehouse in Greenville, Texas with several thousand more scheduled to be delivered by the middle of the first week. We believe that the quantities in these shipments are enough that we will avoid any significant inventory outages, and more coming throughout the season.
Canada will have their first shipment of FRC Hatch Panels arriving Monday, with additional stock arriving the following Monday as well. This means that orders placed with our Canadian office over Kickoff weekend will likely ship Monday or Tuesday. In the event our warehouse in Canada runs out, we do weekly stocking shipments from our warehouse in Greenville to Canada, so we expect any inventory outages in Canada to be relatively short.
Regarding international distribution, we worked with FIRST to determine which teams would be serviced by each of our international warehouses (Adelaide, Australia; Shenzhen, China; Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Warrington, United Kingdom; Dudelange, Luxembourg; and Pickering, Ontario Canada). Each warehouse was allocated FRC Hatch Panels based on the number of teams being serviced by that office.
If you are outside the United States and concerned about the best way to purchase, please reach out to [email protected] and we can work on your personalized solution to get game pieces in your hands as quickly as possible. Please note that we do accept school purchase orders if your team needs to order that way. Check out https://www.vexrobotics.com/contact-us/order-faq for all of our ordering policies, and feel free to contact us if you have any specific questions.
Hope this helps ease any concerns as we strive to be the best partner to the FIRST Community as we can be. Good luck to everyone competing this season!
