May 2020 PerformancePost #5

Welcome to the Fifth ÄLG PerformancePost - a monthly feature for 2020. Expect to hear about new products, offers, updates and announcements right here.

Coronavirus restrictions are easing, however international air freight for large crates is still unobtainable. We are now working with sea freight agents to export these products. Smaller packages are still fine to ship via the usual methods.

Thankfully, business has been good recently & the surge in customer emails and messages has been taking up more time than expected. To help this, we have brought in a Social Media Manager to maintain the Instagram & Facebook accounts, and also help keep our responses to customer queries fast. 

Our new Social Media Manager is Harris, photographer & co-founder of Stealth Automotive. I hope you will join me in welcoming Harris to his new role.

PRODUCT NEWS

Volvo C30 Facelift & Pre-Facelift Grilles

Grilles are ready but unfortunately unable to import them from the factory due to the current air freight costs. To mitigate this, we are having more grilles manufactured so that the cost is better divided up. We are currently seeing an import cost of 3-4x normal which would make it cheaper for us to refund all customers than to import & distribute at the moment. We have explored air freighting smaller batches of grilles but the costs are higher per piece. We are now aiming for a delivery date in August 2020. Thank you for your continued patience with us here.

Volvo V40 Grilles
All Volvo V40 Grilles have been shipped to customers & the pre-order deal has ended. You can order yours now here: https://algperformance.co.uk/products/v40-carbon-grille 

Thank you to the patient backers who made this happen!

P1 Carbon Bonnets
We also took delivery of the P1 bonnets this month, and have shipped some out to customers already. Unfortunately, the quality of some bonnets means we were unable to fulfil all orders. We are manufacturing another batch to cover these orders and will be having a third-party Quality Assurance company carrying out pre-shipping checks at the factory. This will mean the bonnet price will increase, as the checks are somewhat expensive, however we will still barely be breaking even on these products. They look so awesome, we want as many people to have them as possible - these are art!

C30 Halo Kits
Wow, our "largest ever batch" was delivered this month and has almost sold out already. We are now ordering another huge batch and have the manufacturer working constantly to make more. As the volume of products increases, the odd faulty one can slip the net so we are working on creating a burn-in rig here in the UK to weed them out.

Either way, we have spares ready to go!

Volvo C30 STCC-Style Arches
To make the product the best it can be, we have taken the decision to re-design the product using a different 3D Model of the C30 as a base. The original model we used was not quite perfect and it was becoming impossible to work with due to the errors.

We are now working with a talented 3D Artist who has re-designed the kit and it is currently being 3D printed for test fitting. 

A number of cancellations last month impacted our ability to develop on this as quickly as we'd like. But thank you to everyone that is sticking with us. 

AWD Fuel Pirate
We have redesigned the PCB yet again, this time to avoid an embedded microcontroller in favour of an Arduino. The new design is an "Arduino shield" which allows us a much simpler programming procedure. We're currently awaiting some high power precision resistors for the current sensing & then will be shipping these to the US for testing.

SUPPLIERS

We are reaching out to some interesting companies with the goal of expanding our product range to include flywheel & clutches, brake systems, oil coolers and suspension products. Can't reveal more at the moment but watch this space. 

Due to the uncertainty surrounding the virus, shipping concerns and safety, we announced a few weeks ago that we are no longer offering Elevate products to customers. Elevate run a tight operation and are heavily affected by this. We expect their order book to be full for at least several months so will re-assess later in the year.

Sadly, trading with Direnza has been difficult recently due to a number of problems with their stock system. Multiple orders have had to have been refunded due to the stock not actually existing. To mitigate this, we are working to find new suppliers for the most popular Direnza parts.

As we mentioned last month, we teamed up with FulfilmentCrowd to streamline storage, handling & dispatch of products. FulfilmentCrowd have a warehouse local to us that we have products stored in. If an order is placed of a product we store there, it is automatically picked up by their computer system, packed and dispatched the same day (weekday orders before 3pm). Many UK orders are therefore available with Next Day or 2-Day delivery, fully tracked and insured. Currently, they stock our C30 Halo Kits, S40/V50 Halo Kits, Driveshaft Spacers and ÄLG Performance Lowering Springs. 

 EVENTS

Calendar for ÄLG Performance attended events this year so far looks like this:

• All event promotion is suspended indefinitely.
• Events are being cancelled or dates moved all the time.
• We will re-release an autumn/winter calendar when appropriate.

YouTube Channel
This year ÄLG Performance will begin producing video content for YouTube, including product installation guides, product test comparisons and performance tips. Harris has taken on the YouTube channel as one of his long-term goals, and we hope to upload our first videos later this year.