Drop 03 opened at 18:00 Berlin time on a Friday in June and the poster was gone by 18:41. It was the smallest drop we have run, 300 of each object, and it is the one that taught us the most about how we run the next ones. Here is the timeline, from the logs.
18:00 to 18:06
The list got its email 24 hours earlier, so the first six minutes were almost entirely list orders. 184 posters and 121 desk weights went in that window. The site held. The bag sheet, which had been rewritten the week before, held. What did not hold was the certificate numbering, which briefly assigned the same number to two orders placed in the same second. Both customers got a call and a choice; both kept the number.
The desk weight, Metal Object 03, is milled from the offcuts of the SG-01 shell run, so we could only make as many as the offcuts allowed. Three hundred was the honest number. It was not a marketing number.
18:06 to 18:30
The ticker went public at 18:06. Traffic went up by a factor of nine within ninety seconds, mostly from Seoul and Los Angeles, and the poster sold at about four a minute for the next quarter hour. The desk weight moved slower, which we expected: a poster is an easy yes, a machined object at that price is a considered one.
At 18:22 we saw the first drop-off. Not from stock but from the checkout form, where the country selector was defaulting to Germany and people outside the EU were reading the duties line as an extra charge. It is not; duties are in the price. We changed the copy live at 18:25 and the drop-off stopped.
18:30 to 18:41
The last seventy posters went in eleven minutes, most of them to people who had been sitting in the bag sheet with one in it and finally committed. When the counter hit zero, the product page switched to sold out, the ticker switched to the desk weight only, and the list got a second email saying so.
Forty-one minutes is not a brag. It means 300 was too few for the people who wanted one, and we should say that plainly.
Drop 03 debrief, 16 June
What changed
Drop 04 has a run of 2,000, which is the largest we have made and the largest the machines can do in one booking. The certificate number is now assigned at payment, not at add-to-bag. The duties line now says included in every language we ship to. And the list still gets 24 hours, because that is the one part of the drop everyone agreed was fair.
A few desk weights are still on the shelf. The poster will not be reprinted.
