Tandem Updates

TANDEM IS LIVE!

Boona fam,We did it! We crossed the finish line!! Thank you for believing in us and supporting us throughout this journey. We’ve been so encouraged by all the posts, comments, videos, photos, and feedback from everyone. Please keep sharing!!This will be our final routine manufacturing update, so we’ll wrap up with an FAQ for easy reference.How can I support Boona going forward?
Here are THREE hugely helpful things you can do for us:

Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. (Why do we really need so many apps??)
Tag us (@tandemshower) with your new bathroom setups or even just comment on our posts about your experience. This earns more credibility than anything we’d ever say ourselves.
If you have connections to retailers or hotels, we’d be very grateful for introductions! Or maybe you know a business (or celebrity??) that you think would be great for a partnership.

What if I have an issue with my Tandem?
Issues with leaking or pressure? Does the mounting not feel secure? Most issues are addressed by our installation guide and FAQ page. If those don't help, reach out at hello@boona.com. We want everyone to have an awesome experience.Whoa whoa, where the heck is my Tandem??
There are a few orders still on hold. If you haven’t received your order by now, it’s likely for one of two reasons:

The shipping fee hasn’t been paid for your order, or
You haven’t reviewed and approved your order details.

If you're not sure, just send us an email at hello@boona.com.

Alright, that’s all for now. We’ll leave you with one last favorite quote from a customer:

“A GAME CHANGER. I stayed a few nights with my friend who had your shower system and was blown away. At that time, you were a Kickstarter thing so I wasn’t able to purchase but a few months later, I saw your IG page and instantly purchased one. My family is amazed. I tried explaining the magic but you can’t understand unless you’ve had the full experience! Thank you for making such an easy, incredible shower experience!” - Anne S.

Happy Showering, Boona fam!Jeff & Brett
Co-founders of Boona

Click here to learn more about our manufacturing journey.

2022 June

Manufacturing
We’ve now signed manufacturing agreements with all of our vendors. We’ve also kicked off tooling for the valve. (“Tooling” is basically the foundational investment you make in manufacturing that enables you to then create thousands of copies.) And lastly, we’ve placed an order for a manufacturer’s prototype of our showerhead for aesthetic and functional validation.Shipping Address
We’ll send out surveys to collect or verify your shipping address just before we ship to avoid delivery issues. Once we have your shipping address we’ll also be able to calculate any applicable shipping cost + sales tax.

2022 July

Manufacturing
Last month we shared that we kicked off tooling for our valve. (“Tooling” is the foundational investment you make in manufacturing that enables you to then create thousands of copies.) We’re excited to share that the valve handle is complete:

Tooling for the rest of the valve is on track to complete by the end of July. Last month we also mentioned that we ordered a manufacturer’s prototype of our showerhead. Here you can see the progress and evolution of the showerhead design:

The prototype has some aesthetic deviations as well as functional issues but that is to be expected at this stage of development. We’ve already ordered the next engineering validation unit to address these remaining issues. We’ve also already paid for the showerhead tooling. We’ll kick this off as soon as we receive and approve the next showerhead iteration.Tooling for the remaining parts will be batched together based on a final review with the supplier (often referred to as Design for Manufacturing).Shipping Address
We’ll send out surveys to collect or verify your shipping address just before we ship to avoid delivery issues. Once we have your shipping address we’ll also be able to calculate any applicable shipping cost + sales tax.

2022 August

Manufacturing
We crossed our biggest milestone to-date - we officially kicked off tooling for all components of the Tandem Shower. This includes the showerhead which we mentioned last month would require a second prototype assessment. We approved this second prototype along with the rest of our assembly.As a reminder, “tooling” is the foundational investment you make in manufacturing that enables you to then create thousands of copies via molds. Tools are complicated, intricate designs. Tooling is like reverse engineering the negatives from an old-school film camera. Here’s an example of the tooling design for just one of our components:

The first component which now has completed tooling is our valve. We are in the process of reviewing this to make sure it is dimensionally accurate. Once we have a complete first assembly of all components, we’ll have a better sense of our progress and timeline for production shipping.Shipping Address
We’ll send out surveys to collect or verify your shipping address just before we ship to avoid delivery issues. Once we have your shipping address we’ll also be able to calculate any applicable shipping cost + sales tax.

2022 September

Manufacturing
Last month we reported that we kicked off tooling for all components of the Tandem Shower.We’re excited to share that all nine tools for the shower head itself have been completed and we’re currently performing an on-site inspection of these parts.Here are our latest photos. (Please note that these are not representative of the final fit and finish.)

Here’s an example of the tooling for one component. Molten material is poured into the mold we created and cooled to create the desired component.

Here’s a demonstration of the tooling operation for one of our components:

Tooling for the remaining components of the Tandem Shower is progressing nicely but will take a few more weeks.In the meantime, we are preparing for the next stage of development - reliability testing and certification. Our top priority is to identify a testing partner to execute on our suite of tests and formally certify the product.

PackagingWe’ve also begun work on our packaging design. Although this is likely to evolve further, it’s very exciting for us to see what it could look like:

Shipping Address
We’ll send out surveys to collect or verify your shipping address just before we ship to avoid delivery issues. Once we have your shipping address we’ll also be able to calculate any applicable shipping cost + sales tax.

2022 October

Manufacturing
We’re excited to share that the first tooling stage (commonly referred to as “T0”) for the remaining components has been completed! Below are some of the first parts to be formed with the tools:

We’re currently inspecting all of this tooling. Typically it takes at least a few iterations of review and modification to finalize each tool. You may recall that we’ve spent the last month going through these iterations for the showerhead tooling.

Once all the tooling has been finalized, then we begin work on the assembly process for the Tandem Shower. This stage of development will involve building assembly fixtures, testing the assembly process, and making adjustments to ensure a reliable and consistent final product. The Tandem Showers we build at the end of this process will then be used for reliability testing and certifications.Timeline
The tooling process has taken longer than we expected due to recent COVID outbreaks in China which have caused factory shutdowns. In addition, the latest lead-time estimate we received for certifying the Tandem Shower is much longer than our original estimate (~12 weeks). Considering all of this, we expect a 2-3 month delivery delay. We are working hard to ship you the Tandem Shower sooner but of course we won’t compromise on the necessary quality and reliability processes to ensure a premium product.Shipping Address
We’ll send out surveys to collect or verify your shipping address just before we ship to avoid delivery issues. Once we have your shipping address we’ll also be able to calculate any applicable shipping cost + sales tax.

2022 November

Manufacturing
We recently received the first samples of the Tandem components, as well as a second iteration of the showerhead, and have since completed our inspection. Although we’ve not yet approved any of the parts, the open issues are relatively minor. We’re optimistic that within another iteration or two we will be able to approve all components.With that said, we’re excited to share photos of some of the parts!

Packaging
We’re continuing to iterate on our packaging design. We previously shared early renderings of our packaging for Tandem. Now we have physical samples of concepts for our showerheads. As you’ll see, we’re experimenting with ducks and waves ;)

2022 December

Manufacturing
Last month we mentioned that it would take us another iteration or two to approve all components. Well, we’re thrilled to share that we’ve crossed that milestone as of this update! The next step now is to test, refine, and approve the assembly process. This is where we see how well the components come together and how smooth that assembly process is.Here’s the latest version of all three of our colors:

Take a guess which you think will be most popular ;)Packaging
There are two aspects of the packaging design: the structure of the box as well as the graphics. We’ve finalized the structure of the box for our showerheads and are working through the artwork now. We’re also just getting started now on the design of the packaging structure for the full Tandem product.

2023 January

Manufacturing
Last month we shared that we completed reviewing all of our components individually. The next step was to build a small batch sample of the entire product. This is intended to replicate a small production run. In doing so, we’re able to test the assembly process, see how well the parts fit together, etc. This was completed over the last month:

As part of this build, we discovered issues that we’ll need to address before proceeding to the next phase. For the most part, these issues can be resolved by process tweaks. For example, there are some assembly processes that were done by hand but this caused too much variance from sample to sample. To fix this, we’ll be creating more “fixtures” or devices that help constrain an assembly process such that we achieve our quality bar repeatedly. A few other issues will require adjustments to our component molds to ensure tight fits. Overall, nothing major, but the remediation steps will take up to 3 weeks to complete. In combination with the delays reported in our October update, this pushes deliveries into April/May right now.At the moment, China just kicked off its New Year holiday, the biggest holiday of the year there. For about one month, most of our supply chain is not operational. We of course knew about this and are proceeding with other efforts such as third party reliability testing which we just kicked off. In light of the issues we discovered, we know we won’t pass all of our reliability tests, but we’re proceeding with them to catch anything else.Moreover, overall, we’re ecstatic about how the product is coming together. Our showerheads just feel awesome. We’ve tested so many competitors over the past year and we think you’ll all love what we designed.

Packaging
We now have a final candidate for the structure of our packaging for both the Tandem Shower as well as the individual showerheads. We’ve done preliminary testing on it, but have a more thorough validation upcoming. We are also working through the graphic designs for both packages now that we have a final draft of the structure.

2023 February

Manufacturing
Last month we shared that we would need to work with the factory to improve our variance from unit to unit. Additionally, we identified cosmetic changes which, although minor, we felt needed to be fixed to meet our quality bar for mass production. These are all underway and should be complete by the end of the month.We also mentioned that we started reliability testing last month. These all completed successfully and validated our design. Our reliability evaluation included industry standard tests provided by internationally-recognized safety bodies like UL as well as custom tests which we designed due to the unique nature of our product. These tests include load testing, temperature and humidity testing, failure testing, glue testing, etc. The full list is extensive but these screenshots of the report give you a sense of the level of detail this gets into.

Packaging
Last month we ran more thorough testing of our latest packaging but unfortunately we still had substantial failures. Though this isn’t entirely surprising since we have a very large and unique product, it’s still disappointing. As a result of these failures, we’ve decided to over-engineer the packaging to guarantee the product arrives undamaged to everyone. We’re nearly complete with this next iteration and will be running another round of tests right after. As of now, we’re not pushing out the shipping schedule because of this but it certainly remains a risk factor for us.

Order Fulfillment & Shipping Address
We’re excited to share that we’ve selected our North American fulfillment partner. In doing so, we’re able to now assess the shipping costs to our customers. This brings us to our next major milestone - we’re now ready to collect shipping addresses.You should expect to see a survey for this next week. Once we have your shipping address we’ll be able to calculate any applicable shipping cost + sales tax and provide a final checkout link.

2023 March

Manufacturing
Over the last few weeks, we visited our manufacturer to oversee a trial run of production.

Although we will continue to refine our manufacturing process, we’re really excited to share that we completed a batch of the first 150 units. These units are already enroute to the US and will ship out to customers in early May. (Container shipping takes ~4 weeks.) Moreover, this will be the first time that we use our new shipping partner and new warehousing partner. So this is the full end-to-end production experience - a big milestone for us!As mentioned earlier, we’re continuing to refine our manufacturing process. We do this to improve efficiency. For example, we identify areas during manufacturing that cause quality issues and improve them so we reject fewer parts in each production run. Or as another example, we tweak the assembly sequence to reduce the total time to assemble one unit.To build confidence in our processes as we scale up, we will continue to batch our production runs, much like we did with this first 150. Our next production run will be targeting 1,500 units and is estimated to complete in May with deliveries to customers in late June / early July. We’ll have another production run shortly thereafter that will handle all remaining preorders, which are expected to then deliver to customers in late July.We will fulfill preorders based on the following two prioritizations: First to members of our Founders Club. You all were our earliest supporters and we wouldn’t be here without you. The second criteria is simply based on your purchase date relative to other preorders. Please note that it’s still too early for us to predict when exactly each person will receive their order.Packaging
Our packaging structure and graphics are now complete! The last step is to perform formal testing via the International Safe Transit Association. This is a global standard for establishing confidence in packaging reliability.Order Fulfillment & Shipping Address
Thanks to everyone who’s already completed the order details form. If we don’t have your color selection or shipping address yet, we sent you a reminder with the subject: “[Reminder] Tandem Shower Order Details” today (Friday).We’re working with our logistics partner to estimate shipping rates to each address. Once we have this information, we’ll send you the final payment link for the shipping fee. As noted before, we’re shipping orders out in batches and in priority order. We’ll let you know when to expect your delivery as soon as we have that information.

2023 April

Manufacturing
As mentioned last month, we completed our first production batch of 150 units. These are now in our first container on our first ship to the US! The shipment is estimated to deliver by April 27. Our warehousing partner will then need to process the shipment which will take about one week. So we’re looking to start these home deliveries in early May.To select the first 150 recipients, we launched a raffle for our Founders Club yesterday. (For those who don’t know, the Founders Club is the group of our first customers that supported us when Tandem was just an idea.) The raffle closes April 16 and we’ll notify customers who were selected shortly thereafter.Looking ahead, we’re now working with our manufacturer to prepare for the next larger order, estimated at around 1,500 units. At this point, the only reason why we scale up slowly is to continue to build confidence in our training, assembly, and quality control processes. As you increase your numbers (more people, more products, more space, etc.), you can discover new issues so it’s best to be prudent and incremental.Also, last month we informed everyone that we started officially testing our packaging (ISTA). The test is now complete and was largely successful. We needed to make some minor tweaks, but these too are complete and we’ve kicked off the production order of all packaging!Shipping Fee
We’re now working with our new US logistics partner to estimate shipping rates to everyone’s shipping address. This isn’t automated because we don’t yet have inventory that gets sent out right away. As we receive your shipping address, we manually pass it to our partner, and they provide the estimate. Once we have this, we’ll send you a link to pay the shipping fee. We do this in batches.Thank you to everyone who has already paid the shipping fee. Your orders are ready for scheduling!Shipping Scheduling
We will fulfill pre-orders based on the following two prioritizations: First to members of our Founders Club. You all were our earliest supporters and we wouldn’t be here without you. The second criteria is simply based on your purchase date relative to other preorders. Please note that it’s still too early for us to predict when exactly each person will receive their order. Once our raffle ends, we’ll be able to select and notify the first recipients.

2023 May

Manufacturing
Last month we mentioned that we shipped our first batch of 150 units to the US. After those landed, we flew to the warehouse to inspect each unit. I’m excited to share that this was completed and we have our first 150 units shipped to customers! We’re also starting to get feedback from them - here are our favorites so far:

“materials are extremely high quality, beyond what I’ve seen in other shower pieces and products.”
“It's beautifully engineered and works great. the showerheads alone are really awesome.”
“Tandem is a unique product and has revolutionized my shower.”
“Great product, this is going to solve a lot of shower problems for renters around the world!! Thank you! My wife and I have talked about something like this for years.”
“I freaking love it!💜 I can shower with my partner and stay warm without doing the shower shuffle 😉. If showering alone I can have both heads on and take a steam bath. All the materials in the Tandem are quality and I’m just really happy this product and plan to use it until it breaks.”
“It's made it much easier and more enjoyable to shower with my partner—no more switching back and forth to get under the showerhead to warm up.”

The next order of 1,500 units is scheduled to complete this week. It’ll take about 4 weeks to become available for shipping at our warehouse, so we’re estimating to have deliveries by the end of next month. We’ll select customers for this next batch based on criteria previously shared: Are you in our Founders Club? When did you place the order? Did you pay the shipping fee? Etc.We are also on track to start our next production batch for all remaining pre-orders by the end of May.Please note, it’s still too early for us to predict when exactly each person will receive their order. We’ll notify the next 1,500 customers over the next few weeks.Shipping Fee
Just a reminder that we can’t queue up any order for delivery until the shipping fee has been paid. Jeff will send an email reminder for those orders still pending this week. (The subject line will be “Next Step: Tandem Shower Shipping Fee”.) Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. And, thank you to everyone who has already paid the shipping fee. Your orders are ready for scheduling!

2023 June

Manufacturing
Reviews are continuing to come in from our first batch of units shipped to customers. Here are our latest favorites since last month’s update:

“THANK YOU!!! I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect and tailored to “me” product. You took this straight out of my imagination. I am so thrilled with this experience and product!!”
“really enjoy turning both heads on while solo because of the unique feeling of water from both sides. It actually made me want that all the time and showering with just one head seems insufficient now that I've experienced two heads at the same time.”
“My partner and [I] pretty much always shower together in the mornings, and I already I have no idea how we used to manage it with just the one showerhead”
“Giving the Boona 5 stars is the easiest rating of my life. Exceeded all our expectations in our household.”

Our next batch of 1,500 shipments remains on track for delivery by the end of this month. We expect these orders to start going out to customers in early July. We’ll select and notify customers for this next batch based on criteria previously shared (e.g. are you in our Founders Club? When did you place the order? Did you pay the shipping fee? Etc.).Please note, it’s still too early for us to predict when exactly each person will receive their order. We’ll notify the next 1,500 customers over the next few weeks.Lastly, as mentioned in the previous update, we started our next production batch on schedule. This order will cover all of our pre-orders. Manufacturing will complete this week followed by an estimated four week shipment to the US.Shipping Fee
Just a reminder that we can’t queue up any order for delivery until the shipping fee has been paid. Jeff will send an email reminder for those orders still pending today. (The subject line will be “Next Step: Tandem Shower Shipping Fee”.) Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. And, thank you to everyone who has already paid the shipping fee. Your orders are ready for scheduling!

2023 July

Feedback
We’re excited to share that we’ve delivered another 1,500 units as previously planned. The customer feedback has been awesome:

“This has really been everything I wanted from the product. The quality is fantastic, the installation was easy, and the dual showerheads have absolutely improved the quality of the shower. Thank you for an excellent product.”
“This has changed showering in our house! Together, solo, its amazing!”
“I was shocked at the build quality and how nice the shower heads are! The pressure from both is awesome and we thoroughly enjoy it!”
“Easy install. My wife loves that water can come from just one end or both. What she first thought was this was another way for me to "get with her" but, we actually had a very nice talk about our day, families and how we feel about things. This is a great appliance to be intimate without having to get intimate. 7 stars in our book.”
“I bought this shower head for my disabled son and I, he’s 5 and autistic. I live a very on the go life with 3 boys always playing multiple sports, work and my wife. With his autism he doesn’t know to wash himself like my older boys did by that age so it’s easier to just bring him in the shower with me. It’s always been a battle for the shower head and trying to get my own personal space while showering. This gives him his own shower head to stand under and hopefully soon I can teach him how to wash himself at the same time. This shower head really was an amazing solution to a never ending battle so thank you so much. I have already started to spread the word to fellow fathers with disabled sons.
“We have 5 year old twin boys. One liked to shower, the other would only take baths. They decided to take a shower together after adding our tandem shower heads, and they LOVED it! The ""previously bath only"" son said, ""I love this! I want to take showers all the time!"" Not to mention the fact that they played together, sang together, and got clean in the shower together (a few times now) and it is the most adorable thing ever.”

And so many more… Thank you to everyone for responding to our surveys and tagging us on social media (@tandemshower). Your feedback and support is immensely appreciated and is helping us build this business.Thanks too to all the early recipients for helping us refine our installation instructions.Shipping Progress
We’re excited to share that nearly all Founders Club orders have already or are about to ship! This is a huge milestone for us. This product couldn’t have existed without our Founders Club and we’re so happy to finally deliver on our promise.We’re estimating to have all remaining orders ready to ship over the next 2-3 weeks. We’ll reach out to everyone directly as your order comes up next in the queue. Please keep in mind that we’re shipping out units in the order we received the purchases.Shipping Fee
Just a reminder that we can’t queue up any order for delivery until the shipping fee has been paid. Jeff will send an email reminder for those orders still pending today. (The subject line is “Next Step: Tandem Shower Shipping Fee”.)