Hi there BeYou friends!

We’re here today with an impromptu update, with an important announcement we have to make.

TLDR

  • A few people in our community have started a personal vendetta against this company and campaign, with the final aim to destroy our ability to ship your chairs.
  • They have instigated people to report us as “scammers” to our payment processor, Stripe, despite not having a shred of evidence to support them.
  • They managed to get our Stripe account closed, which makes it impossible for us to accept your shipping fees right now as planned and stated in the last update.
  • This does NOT impact our manufacturing. We are continuing full steam ahead to produce your chairs. We’ve also included a video of your chairs being mass-manufactured in this update, please see below.
  • But it does impact when we can accept shipping and start delivering your chairs – that is now going to be delayed.
  • Sadly, the attack from these people continues. We are being constantly spammed, called names, accused of being scammers and so on. The only reason we’re sharing this now is because their malevolent attacks have impacted YOU.
  • But we will not abandon our responsibility towards our entire community and our mission to change sitting forever. This is just another challenge in the sea of challenges we’ve gone through and conquered in the last 2 years. We will conquer this too, despite the ill-intentioned few.
  • We are currently working on getting a new payment processor to start accepting shipping fees soon. It’s sad because we are ready to get you your chairs imminently, but this has set the delivery back a little.
  • Our next update will have more information about finalizing your shipping and getting your chairs delivered.

FULL VERSION

Because the chair is now completed, the next step is shipping your BeYous. This is exactly what we’ve been working on in the past weeks, around the clock.

There’s been a recent development that we need to share with you. Our Stripe account got closed recently. This is the only thing keeping us from completing the last stage of our project: you finalizing and paying your shipping so we can deliver your chairs to you.

Why did this happen?

We were fully verified by Stripe and had an excellent relationship with them over the last few years. Our account was closed due to a sudden increase in the number of complaints made to Stripe directly, claiming we are scammers. 

These claims are completely false and unjustified. They have been instigated on purpose by a few people in our community who have made sabotaging this project into their personal vendetta.

You can check the closure notification below. Because of this, we have been forced to change payment gateways and move away from Stripe.

What happens now?

As promised in our last update, we intended to start collecting shipping fees this week. However, because of this unexpected closure from Stripe, we now are forced to delay accepting the shipping charges. You should know this does not impact our manufacturing in any way: we are continuing to produce all your chairs.

We know it’s been hard…

We are completely aware of how difficult it has been for some people in our community to keep their faith in our project because of the delays. As mentioned before, it’s due to the challenges that have been totally out of our control - COVID19. 

But it’s also because of the constant instigative statements, actions, threats, slander and unfounded accusations that we are “scammers who are trying to steal people’s money”.

Members of our community have asked various questions with the purpose of getting clarifications or validity on the project and timelines. And every single time, without fail, we have been happy to respond to them and explain the truth, helping to alleviate any concerns.

… BUT it doesn’t give anyone the right to attack people with no proof

In the past few weeks, some of the questions took a turn. They became overt accusatory statements towards our team and company, made without any solid grounds. We soon learned these members are not actually trying to understand the information they receive. They only want to do anything possible to harm this project. 

Their ultimate goal? Try to destroy our ability to serve you and deliver your BeYou chairs. 

It is because of the care and respect we have for our community that we are posting this impromptu update. Like always, we simply put the facts on the table and what we’re presenting in this update is simply the reality.

We’ve had our fair share of negative attitudes, comments and attacks over the years. It’s not something we’re hurt by, it’s just part of the journey. But NOW, everything changed because their actions impacted YOU. And like always, we promised to be transparent and tell you the reason for any delays.

Past setbacks do not make one a scammer

One of our community members tried to “prove that we are scammers” by attempting to “expose” our team by sharing information about a previous crowdfunding project initiated years ago by our CEO, Sam - with a completely different team, for a completely different product.

The campaign got canceled on Kickstarter and all backers were refunded, due to a technicality. That was actually explained and shared recently in one of Sam’s talks in a motivational event called “I <3 Failure”. 

As the video shows, it's Sam talking about LOSING that money. Anyone with logic and common sense understands, scammers don’t talk openly about scamming people. That’s the last thing they would do. And since he didn’t get the money, where is the scam?!

This project was initiated many years ago and has nothing to do with the BeYou Chair product, process or progress.

The real scammers: copycats

We are NOT associated with Wayfair or any other brand or platform. The BeYou Chair is unique. You may already know we have a few patents pending for the BeYou chair. 

A few backers confirmed they ordered the chair from Wayfair and received cheap knock-offs instead. That’s because any brand or company outside of BeYou is not associated with us and cannot replicate this unique extremely complex, patented chair. The knock-offs are dangerous versions of our original prototype. 

We’re regularly reporting such copycat sellers to the relevant authorities, in an effort to help keep the online buying space safe. Please beware of buying or using BeYou copycats!

One backer’s (suspicious) journalistic investigation

There is no shred of evidence that supports the accusations towards this campaign. That’s because the accusations are false. Despite that, our team has been bullied and spammed with offenses, slanderous accusations and requests that have absolutely nothing to do with the development of this project.

One of our backers, who also happens to be a journalist, has taken on a personal vendetta against us and she’s on a mission to do everything possible to destroy this campaign, see it fail and have everyone lose their money.

Again, we understand the frustration with the delays. But she and a few other members of our community have now trampled over any common-sense boundaries, going so far as sabotaging our payment processor and subsequently trying to jeopardize our ability to deliver your products.

The screenshots below show the obvious grasping at straws and trying to find something where there’s nothing. Press logos on our website are intentionally misread, for a reason to post yet another comment saying we're “lying” about something and so on.

We reached out to this backer and offered to sit down for an interview with her. It took more than a week to get a response, after we insisted a second time on an interview. 

This is very odd and extremely suspicious, because:

  • On Indiegogo, she answered in the next minute after our customer happiness agent responded. But now, for an interview request we sent her, it took 8 days.
  • One of the cornerstones of journalism is making every effort to get responses from those who are the subjects of criticism in a story. Being offered an interview is a journalist’s dream. We had to follow-up and ask a second time to get a response.

The response? In private, we’ve been notified she’s still working on the article and we will schedule the interview in a few weeks. BUT publicly, the baseless accusations framed as “facts” continue, instigating more and more people to reach out to our payment processor to tell them we are scammers, request chargebacks and/or sue our team. 

Such a huge difference between private and public communication makes us really question if there’s any journalistic integrity in this investigation.

Just so you are aware, the toxicity is not ending anytime soon. This person has been telling everyone about the huge article she’s writing about the BeYou project and the owners. We’re actually expecting to see what will be published and how much of the information is accurate, considering the interview invitation which has been postponed for now.

The unofficial group: where conspiracy theories are shared

These instigative actions took place on our Indiegogo campaign, and on a separate unofficial Facebook group. That group has 300 members, but only a few people are constantly active, instigating people to take all kinds of negative actions against us. Unfortunately, the few with the loudest voices get heard over the majority who are just going about living their lives in these challenging times.

One member of our team joined this unofficial ‘group’, to understand what are the confusions and the purpose of this group.

That’s how we saw that one of our backers made a post in that group pointing out some facts, trying to seek clarity and reason with people that were instigating others to sue us. 

But the group doesn’t tolerate that! You’re only a fit if you think we’re evil incarnate. Because he didn’t get with the program, he was removed from the group later on, along with our team member. Yet another obvious way that these people are not after a solution. They’re after the destruction of this project.

In this group, our journalist backer has found a few like-minded people that are helping her by dissecting every word we ever wrote, spamming us with questions for her and so on.

One of the strangest conspiracy-theories these people are maliciously spreading is that we’re faking all our videos, pictures and even faces of our team members, so we can continue to make money from new pre-orders. This is 100% false. 

We have zero financial incentive: we have not been taking new orders on our website or anywhere else for the past few months!

It’s been a sad realization to see that these few members of our community are going so far as mounting organized attacks, reaching out to our service providers with the intention to make this project fail. And ultimately end up with every backer losing their money.

What does the BeYou team have to say?

To make it extremely clear:

  • We have not lied.
  • We have not scammed anyone.
  • We reply and respond to every comment or email in a timely fashion.
  • We have been extremely transparent through the entire project.

Everything we do is REAL. Behind our replies and updates, there are simply hard working people who have not hurt or scammed anyone. We’re just people inspired by the same mission, who are trying to make their way in this world for themselves and their children and families, and help build a thriving business.

We don’t understand why there are a few people hell bent on doing everything to destroy our ability to deliver this revolutionary project to the many thousands of people who have supported us.

We’re deeply sorry that our company values, our dynamics and our work ethics aren’t able to transpire to the exterior – if our community could see our team passionately at work, truly hear us out, spend even a day with us, any bit of doubt on this project would be shattered.

What happens next?

But we are here, and WE ARE STRONG, and we will be doing EVERYTHING WE CAN to complete this project successfully and deliver BeYou to each and every supporter.

 

We will never let a few toxic people with axes to grind, stop us from delivering to our amazing backers! WE WILL NOT LET THAT HAPPEN no matter how hard they try.

 

COVID COULDN’T STOP US, so we promise neither will they!

We are still working really hard on absolutely all fronts in order to conquer the challenge we’ve been faced with at the moment and deliver your chairs.

Accepting shipping fees: We are currently working on adding a new payment processor so we can process shipping fees and start delivering ASAP. But this could mean there’s a small delay in accepting your shipping and getting your chairs delivered.

Manufacturing: Manufacturing is continuing uninterrupted as scheduled. We estimate that at the end of the month we will start shipping chairs to our fulfillment centers worldwide.

Managing accusations: We are in contact with our lawyers and we’ll manage the situation accordingly. This is the last time we will ever address these accusations in a public update. This is not the space for that, but because it cost us our payment processor and caused potential delays we felt it was our responsibility to share it this one time with our community. 

 

We are also taking measures such as effectively stopping any replies to people who have proven to be ill-intentioned, except for actual help we can give for their contributions and/or pre-orders. Any further comments from these people will not be responded to, but will be shared with our legal team and hold them to task, you have our word on that!

Manufacturing

As you already know from the previous update, manufacturing has already started! 😍

On March 1st we celebrated the amazing (and very much final) BeYou chair reveal, now we want to share with you the manufacturing process, so you can see how your chair is made.

Website redesign

As you may have already seen, we have been redesigning our website. That is because BeYou is here, done and ready to transform and we’re making the last steps towards closing one chapter in order to start the next one.

The redesign might have caused previous pre-order links to stop working. If you need any details from your contribution, just reach out to our Customer Happiness team, and they will be more than happy to help. 

Pre-order customers, because the pre-order campaign has ended, the FAQs we had no longer apply for the future customers, which is why you will no longer see the page listed there.

Do not worry, as we have not forgotten about you and we know how important those FAQs are to our pre-order community. The page still exists and is updated (only it is not displayed) and you can find it here: BeYou chair - Pre-order FAQs

The Next Update

The next update will include: 

  • Instructions for paying your shipping
  • How to make a final choice for the color of your BeYou(s)
  • How to update your final shipping address
  • Complete instructions on how to complete your shipping fees.

As mentioned in the previous update, we will start shipping your BeYou depending on how soon you complete all the steps in the shipping guide. All the info you need will be in the next update. We still aim to get all chairs delivered in the next 8 – 12 weeks after we start collecting shipping fees.

Getting in Touch

Please keep in mind that our correspondence volume tends to increase after each update. That’s why we please ask you to bear with us, as it might take us a bit to respond over the next few days. 

Please refrain from following up as it will push your message to the end of the queue.

The fastest way to get an answer to any questions you might have is via email at contact@beyouchair.com. To greatly help our small yet mighty Customer Happiness team, please submit your message like this.

Thank you yet again for your support. 

Have a wonderful day ahead,

The BeYou team