Note: New Telescope Orders Have Been Suspended
Production may resume September, 2020. Please see our July 2019 Press Release for more information. The video at left describes in more detail how we made this decision and what the future may hold. Also check out the November update below.
November 30, 2019, Update
In July, 2019, we announced that September would be our final definitive production run of custom telescopes and that we would be taking a hiatus from accepting NEW orders after September. In July we still had 11 telescopes in our queue of work and we wanted to build out our queue of work to a full 12 months, which would allow us to focus solely on building and delivering telescopes. The process of taking new orders, discussing options with customers, preparing price quotes/invoices, collecting on invoices, and ordering components are all extremely time consuming aspects of the business, detracting greatly from our time in the workshop physically building telescopes. So we opted to group as many telescope orders together for one last, definitive, production run and then go full steam ahead in the workshop for a year's worth of building and then figure out if/how to proceed.
The parts are in and we are now rolling along with this production run. Thanks to these 12 amazing customers who heeded our announcement in July and jumped onboard with their orders. They grew our queue of work to a total of 22 telescopes currently in production. This volume of work will carry us through September of 2020 by which point we will have decided how we will proceed with future orders.
There are a few different ways Teeter's Telescopes could continue, which include:
-
Lower volume and/or more infrequent production runs of custom telescopes; and/or,
-
Discontinuing certain product lines to run a more efficient operation; and/or,
-
Offering only In-Stock telescopes which are completed and THEN offered For Sale; or,
-
Suspending operations indefinitely.
One thing is certain and that is that we cannot continue as we have been the last several years, building upwards of 30-40 telescopes per year. We hope the next 10 months will give clarity as to how we would like to proceed so we can continue to build telescopes AND still be able to pay the bills (eg. keeping my other non-astronomy-related work obligations satisfied). No decisions have been made at this point as focus needs to be squarely on completing the telescope orders we currently have on the books.
Thanks all! And, as you can see below, we have a lot of work to do. Time to get on it!
