From: Heathkit <[email protected]>
Date: October 8, 2015 at 2:40:51 AM PDT
To: [email protected]
Subject: New Heathkit kits.
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Dear Heathkit Insider,
“What I really hope Heathkit will produce,” a Silicon Valley colleague recently
told me, “is a new radio kit with a beautiful finish, maybe in rosewood.”
Something great to enjoy building and learn from, and also visually stunning,
so he could put it in his living room and keep it forever.
Today, my friend gets his wish.
Exciting news. More on that in a moment.
It’s been a while since we wrote to our Heath Insiders. We promised not to
clutter your email inbox until we had something to say. Here’s a quick summary
of what we’ve quietly been doing at Heathkit during the past year: We assembled
a terrific team of very talented, hard-working, inventive people. We acquired
another company and merged its management, products, assets, and operations
gracefully into Heath Company. We ensured we own every last bit of Heathkit
intellectual property, to bring you all the manuals, books, vintage designs,
and classic logos you love, unencumbered and in perpetuity. We built a company
division and acquired a line of vintage add-on designs to sustain the vintage
products so important to many Insiders. We developed and integrated our eBay
site, so you can buy or bid on auctioned items. We authored and published a
helpful Android software app on Heathkit’s GooglePlay site, with more apps to
come.
That’s a lot, but there’s more. We’ve designed and developed a wide range of
entirely new kit products. We authored the manuals for these kits, complete
with the beautiful line art you rely on, preserving and respecting our iconic
historic Heathkit style. We developed many new inventions and filed patents on
them. We relocated Heathkit, and set up a factory, and a warehouse, and
offices, in Santa Cruz, California, near Silicon Valley. We built the back
office infrastructure, vendor and supply chain relationships, systems,
procedures, operations methods, and well-thought-out corporate structure that a
manufacturing company needs to support its customers, to allow us to scale
instantly the day we resume major kit sales. All this effort enables us to
introduce a fleet of new kits and helps ensure Heathkit can grow, prosper, and
continue to bring you great new products for a very long time.
As you can see, we’ve been busy. It takes a lot to bring Heathkit back into the
kit business. And we’ve done it.
We’ll have many product announcements coming, but today I want to tell you
about our flagship kit.
It’s a simple kit—by intent. We feel an enormous responsibility to respect and
maintain the incredible legacy of Heathkit. To us this means, bringing you kits
you can build yourself, using our historic renowned Heathkit you-can-do-it “We
won’t let you fail”™ approach, yielding working useful appliances so beautiful
you’ll be proud to display and use them daily. It also means creating an
educational experience that teaches you how they work, and how you can modify
or repair what you own.
Further, we feel a very strong commitment to making this experience available
to everyone, from 8 to 88 years old. That’s an especially high hurdle. And
we’ve done it. The result is the Explorer Jr.™ It’s a simple, beautiful
professional-looking little radio. It’s a historic design, made new. It comes
in several different colors. You build it yourself. Take it anywhere. When you
build it and as use it, you’ll learn to fall in love with radio, for the first
time—or all over again. And it’s just the first in a series.
As a Heath Insider, you are special to us. In a few days, we’ll connect
www.heathkit.com to our new website where our new products are listed. But you
stayed with us through this process. And we want to thank you. So we are giving
you, as an Insider, personal advance notice of the new products and new website
through this email, before we tell the general public. We want you to know we
appreciate your enthusiasm and respect for the Heathkit name and history.
We know that as an Insider, you want to own the first major kit we’ve issued in
decades. But please also think about this:
Maybe you have a child, or a granddaughter or grandson, who is ready to start
their lifelong love for technology, or who will benefit from the enormous
self-esteem that comes from accomplishment. They deserve an Explorer Jr too.
(Remember to choose the style they’ll want most—we have six colors). And then,
please think about gently helping them build it. You might remember the
parent-and-child graphics on the front of so many Heathkit manuals: We can’t
count the number of Insiders who fondly remember an adult helping them build
their first Heathkit when they were young. What a great way to spend time with
someone you care about.
We do not expect initial stock to last long, so please don’t wait to visit our
site. Also, please be patient while our new major kit, and new website, go from
zero to sixty in two seconds. We might have a few bumps in the road as we scale
up, and we appreciate in advance your patience. We’ll work with you to get
everything we can right.
We anticipate 30-day shipping time for this week’s orders, and we’ll continue
to do everything we can to get all kits ordered this Fall to you in time for
the holidays. You can see and order the Explorer Jr. at
https://shop.heathkit.com/ now. Please don’t wait to be last: We don’t want to
disappoint anyone, but most of all, we don’t want to disappoint our Insiders.
Think about whether there’s anyone who would love one of these kits as a
holiday present. And thanks for your loyalty and patience as we brought back to
you Heathkit’s incredible legacy of the world’s best kits again.
Sincerely,
Andy (President)
and the team at Heathkit
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____________________________________________________
Heathkit ® is a registered trademark, and Explorer™, Explorer Jr.™, Heathkit Jr.™, and
Heathkit® Insider™ are trademarks, of Heath Company. (c) 2015 All rights reserved.
Heathkit® in all uses, the Heathkit name, the Heathkit logos and slogans, and
"Heathkit® Educational Systems" are internationally registered trademarks of
Heath Company. Other non-Heathkit® marks incidentally appearing here are the property of
their respective owners. This message was only sent to people who opted in to the
Heathkit Insiders email list.
Links:
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[1]
http://heathkit.com/http://www.heathkit.com/mailinglist/user/mailings.php?mail_id=15&[email protected]&code=9432379848967921c7b2ddefae044b94
[2]
http://heathkit.com/http://www.heathkit.com/mailinglist/user/[email protected]&code=9432379848967921c7b2ddefae044b94
