It was because our company’s operation was to sell N20 first to gain more funding before developing the new product, N40.

The Covid 19 epidemic comes to an end in 2023, and everyone’s life is slowly starting to get back on track. But to be honest with you, our sales have been greatly affected. Although we know customers are worried about buying high-priced music boxes online and want to see the real products displayed in the store, due to the traffic restrictions of the epidemic, we can only focus most of our efforts on online sales.

But the mechanical music box needs to be experienced in person to appreciate its full charm. It is difficult to realize the advantages of the mechanical music box only from watching the small screen of your mobile phone. So we have made a lot of attempts to conquer this challenge. For example, we set up a live-stream recording environment in our Taipei office to take pictures and receive sound from the Muro Box N20 product sample in our office to welcome global visitors of our website to test playing it remotely anytime they want.

Therefore, at that time, we made a major decision on the direction of operation, which was to suspend the development of N40 and put all our efforts on the promotion of N20.

Of course, you may agree with this decision, or you may disagree with it. But here I only share with you the factors I have considered.

First of all, the higher the price, the lower the number of music boxes can be sold. The suppliers we cooperate with are very old-fashioned, but they don’t actually make much money. So if we focus on N40, which is more like a hand-made artwork than a mass-production product, the order quantity of its parts cannot meet the Minimum Quantity of Order(MOQ) required by its manufacturers. Hence, those part suppliers will increase our company’s purchase price, and then we will have to increase the end user price significantly, too.

And when the market for N40 is not clear, it is very risky to put resources on developing new products. I discussed this matter with several friends who also started their own companies, and most of their feedback is to avoid taking more risks by developing a new product in the current economic situation. They said that we should try our best to sell more units of the existing product, N20. So if you have been paying attention to our email updates for a while, you will find that although we did not develop N40 in the past year, we actually tested various variants of N20.

Take the N20 Lite as an example. It is a simplified version of the N20. At the beginning of last year, we tested the ultra-cheap N20 Lite at NT$6,600 (220USD). What kind of concept is this? That is, we betrayed all the dealers, saying that the profits were not enough, so we did not allow them to sell this model, but let customers buy directly on our website. Set disruptive prices at the expense of dealers’ profit, but consumers don’t care how much profit you make.

So we have also noticed this unhealthy state and have been thinking about how to solve it. If you are very concerned about our recent situation, you should also notice that we have launched the N20 Lite SE very briefly, which is the subscription-based Lite version. As for the reason for the short-term launch and removal, there is actually a story, but it has nothing to do with the current theme about N40. Let’s leave it to another story to answer it later.

Now, N20 Lite has returned to the price it should have, which means that we have adjusted our strategy again. Although the general environment is not good, we need to fight side by side with our global dealers, not to erode their profits. I’m sorry everyone, there should never be any price lower than 6,600NTD (220USD) in the future.

That is, we realized that the low price did not create value for us. So we started to look back, what exactly do customers want us to do? Obviously, most of the demand is to develop the N40.

Our N20 received the most comments from customers because of the lack of flats and sharps. So eventually, we are back to the starting point of N40 development.