Happy New Year!
Daedalus has grown a lot since we first started with the Blackbird in October of 2018. Since then we have developed 10 wheels and starting this year two winding tools, the Roly-Poly and Whirligig. We are so fortunate to have such a loyal and wonderfully supportive community. You have all helped inspire us to continue innovating and developing new ideas. With our current wait times for our wheels along with the expansion into the Roly-Poly and Whirligig, we’ve had some who are concerned about how this will affect wait times going forward. Rest assured this has been at the forefront of our minds as well. We have known that we need to expand but doing so is a delicate process and can have growing pains that can slow things down before things get better. Over the past year, we have made great strides in getting ready for expansion. We are looking forward to Daedalus spreading its wings and adding some much-needed trusted hands to ensure the continued quality we all know and love in Daedalus.
We have already expanded our print farm extensively over the past year. At the present moment we have 6 Prusa Mk3s, 2 Prusa Mini, 6 Raise 3D E2, and at the end of the year we added 6 Bambu X1C with another 6 Bambus on the way! The new Bambu printers will be dedicated to printing Roly-Polies and Whirligigs. While the Raise make wheels and the Prusa print bobbins.
As it stands we have a staff that works fabulously together. So finding new people to join the Daedalus family was not an easy task. Rebecca and Evanita run a tight ship with an eye to detail. Rebecca is busy behind the scenes managing the company and building wheels in her spare time. Evanita is not just her right hand but her right arm, handling all things computer related as well as graphic design, photography, customer service, and generally helps keep things organized. As if that wasn’t enough she will now be building control modules and those extension cables you all love so much. David has recently been designing but the fun new task for him has been, teaching and mentoring, as he begins to train some new blood here at Daedalus. Over the last year, we've been training Jennifer Hendrix, whom some of you may already know from the fiber community.
Jenn is a native of Michigan & has lived in the Greenville area of South Carolina with her husband, Will, for 13 years. Jenn started her fiber arts journey nearly 20 years ago and loves to spin, knit, and weave. She is also a novice woodturner and loves spending time in the Smoky Mountains in her MINI. Jenn has 2 grown-up daughters & 3 grandkids. (If you visit our Saturday night Zooms, you may have ‘met’ Jenn & her youngest grandson.)
Jenn has recently been learning fabrication and apprenticing to build Wheels, Roly-Polies, and Whirligigs. In addition to Jenn, we are apprenticing a close family friend Katherine Wallace.
Known to us as Katie, she, like Dave, is a native of Kentucky. She is an avid gardener and loves her animals, which include a dog, 3 cats, and several chickens. But her number one love is her husband Neil and daughter Lillian. Katie has been apprenticing to assemble Wheels as well as Roly-Polies and Whirligigs.
Both Jenn and Katie will be at the Opening dinner at the Fly-In for those interested in meeting the new team members.
Our goal for Daedalus going forward and the reason for our apprenticeships are to reduce the waitlist. We want to get to a point where we will have wheels in stock with no wait unless it’s a custom order. We will still offer completely custom Starlings (meaning you pick the body and trim color) on a waitlist, however black bodies with colored trim and colored bodies with black trim will be in stock and ready to ship. Magpies and Falcons will be basically the same as Starlings except their bodies are always black so once the waitlist has been met for these models we will have them in stock and ready to ship. We also intend to up the output of Sparrows so hopefully, we can meet the demand enough to have those in stock regularly and ready to ship.
The expansion doesn’t stop there. We intend to add a couple more wheels to the lineup in the next few years as well as several other Fiber related tools. We plan to expand the print farm further at the end of 2023 or early 2024.
So stay tuned and buckle up, things may seem crazy here but we are thrilled and between Becca and Evanita, things are under control.
- Team Daedalus