Build timeline
What we have been doing instead of opening
Every entry has a date. The ones marked as failures are ours, and they are on the page on purpose, because a timeline with nothing going wrong on it is a press release.
We publish our own mistakes here. Not the flattering ones. If we break something and you find it before we do, it goes on this page with the date on it. We will credit you by founder number if you want it, and we might send you a completely meaningless trinket of our appreciation.
Found one? Say what you were doing when it broke and send it to [email protected]
- Before any of this
Six and a half million dollars of product, moved on a square wheel.
439 orders since August 2021. Every one of them consulted before it was placed. Every quote, every sales order, every invoice written out by hand. Every email drafted and sent by one person, every payment taken by that person, every shipment watched by him. No software did any part of it. In the same years he engineered and built a completely self-sufficient off-grid power system for cast and star wagons, hair and makeup, production and camera trailers - the gold standard for those trailers now, and the reason a set can run without an onset generator or a large grid connection. The work was good. The method was a square wheel. Pulling that cart takes exactly the hours that used to go to customers, and they noticed before he did. This store is what replaces the wheel.
- February 2024
The first store went up in the hours left over.
February 2024, built between orders that were still being quoted, invoiced, emailed, paid and shipped by hand. It was a catalog with a checkout bolted to it, made by somebody with no time to think about what it ought to be. It failed for the same reason the square wheel did, and it went in the bin.
- June 2026
We threw out the second one too, and went back to the drawing board.
Then we did something the industry apparently finds novel: we researched what a customer actually wants out of an e-commerce site, and rebuilt around the answer. What came out of that is the part that matters. The best product for you beats the most profitable product for us, and where those two disagree, you win. Honesty and transparency are not a values page here; they are the reason the freight number is on the screen instead of buried in the price. In practice it also means the gear is grouped by what it does, because nobody has ever woken up wanting a Victron. They want the lights to stay on.
- July 2026
930 part numbers stopped hiding their specs in a paragraph.
Continuous power, surge, DC input range, battery voltage, interfaces, all broken out into their own fields instead of buried in a paragraph, across 930 of the 980 Victron part numbers in scope. That is the boring work that makes a filter actually filter. Twenty-two of them now do.
- July 2026Our fault
We called the catalog clean after looking at two families out of two hundred.
Then we audited all 312 published products and about a third of them carried at least one real defect. The sample passed. The class did not. We now have a standing rule that a passing sample is not a resolution, and it exists because of this.
- July 2026Our fault
Two inverters were filed under a frequency rating in the certification column.
That put "50/60 Hz" on the page twice, on two different filter rows, doing two different things. Vernon found it by looking at the page. We had a checker for exactly this. The checker was looking somewhere else. We swept all 204 variations carrying those fields: exactly two were wrong, both fixed.
- August 2026Our fault
The phone number in our footer had never worked. Not once.
Somebody typed the words into a link field and the editor helpfully turned them into a web address, so clicking it tried to reach a website called "Phone:". It was on the home page, the shop, the cart, the checkout, the account page, the terms and the privacy policy. For months.
- August 2026Our fault
102 of our 115 product photographs were being served pre-cropped.
Square thumbnails cut the ends off things that are not square, which is most electrical equipment. All 115 now serve uncropped.
- August 2026
The front door went up.
The coming-soon page, founding customer numbers, and a humor setting you can turn down or up. Founding number 0001 is reserved for Tom from Myspace, who is exempt from the purchase requirement on grounds of service to the industry.
- August 2026Our fault
We shipped a joke that stayed on screen for 1.4 seconds.
Long enough to notice, not long enough to read. It now holds in proportion to the length of the line, with a floor of 2.8 seconds. While fixing it we found that readers who ask their computer to reduce motion were getting less time than everyone else, despite seeing the whole line at once with nothing to watch. That was backwards. It is now the other way around.
- The whole time
This store was built by an electrical engineer and a machine, arguing.
Worth saying out loud, since most of the internet is doing this now and almost nobody admits it. The machine built the store: the pages, the filters, the code, and the checks that keep catching its own mistakes. It does not get a vote on anything electrical. Every spec, every sizing call, every compatibility question goes to the man who is an electrical engineer and designs lithium batteries for a living, and he overrules it regularly. Several of the failures on this page are the machine's work. It found most of them itself. He found the ones it missed, which is roughly the arrangement you would want.
- Right now
852 logged decisions and no cash register.
Every decision on this build is written down with its date and its reasoning, including the ones we reversed. What is still missing before we open: a way to take your money, a freight estimator we trust in front of a customer, and a lawyer's blessing on the giveaway. In that order.
When the freight estimator is done, its scorecard goes on this page. Not every order, because nobody wants to read that and we are not going to write it. A rolling summary each quarter: how often we got it right, how far off we were on average, and the worst single miss, named.