Kris here. I’m popping in this week to talk about some big changes happening here behind the scenes at NE. The short version is that we’re making a lot of changes to make it easier to get Noise Engineering products, but that will take some time and quite a lot of work. What isn’t changing is our commitment to giving you great products and great customer service. Read on for the details.

TL;dr

We’re changing the way we do pretty much everything. Although all physical products are currently out of stock, this is a temporary situation and we expect to be back in business within a few weeks. NO support services (customer service, firmware flashing, Univer Inter programming interface) are changed by this transition. More details and the what and why are below.

Background: The way we were

For the past eight years, we have worked with a contract manufacturer here in California; they have also served as our fulfillment partner. Any order placed by a customer or a retailer went through them. This allowed the four of us here at NE to focus on the fun part: creating new things. To say we wouldn’t be here without them is an understatement. We have weathered so many things together: being their first big customer, a pandemic, various illnesses, part shortages, and so much more. We are overwhelmingly grateful for their partnership.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. And last year, the combination of the slowing economy, decreased sales in music instruments as a category, and increases and unpredictability in costs have meant that the team we’ve been working with has decided to stop building modules. We weren’t ready to throw in the towel, though, so we’re working to keep things going. This post is a glimpse into some of the things we’re doing here at NE right now and how this transition will affect our wonderful customers. 

Technologic: Manufacturing and product changes

When we learned that we’d need to look into new manufacturing, we contacted several of our friends in the Eurorack community to ask questions. After a lot of research, we decided to move our Eurorack manufacturing to Latvia, to the same people who build a lot of other great brands, including Erica Synths and Gamechanger Audio. (Huge thank you to Girts from Erica Synths for helping us with so many steps here).

In order to build our products at the new facility, we needed to move to more readily available parts. This includes moving back to the Thonk-type jacks most of you are familiar with, pots that are widely available, and more. I’ve spent the past several months prototyping new versions of our existing products and we’ve put one into production in Latvia so far. Fear not, though: a huge part of this prototyping is ensuring that the functions and firmwares of our modules will remain the same.

Finally, our new producer is helping meet a few of our sustainability goals! First off, our new custom packaging will not include any plastic. Gone are the pink static bags that we used for so many years. In addition, we’ll be able to minimize our shipping -- more on that below.

Facelift: Fade to (Matte) Black

Moving to the new fab also gives us a bit more transparency in prices which has been really useful. For example, we’ve found that the metal front panel on the first thing we built took several months to acquire and was a substantial part of the cost. This gave us pause, so we made the decision that moving forward, we’ll take a page from the greats (like Make Noise) who use black matte PCB panels. This will also allow us some fun and flexibility with panel art that metal makes impossible as we develop new products (and we’re still working on those, too! Look for some fun new things later this year).

Shipping products: Signed, sealed, delivered

In the past, our manufacturer would build the product and then put it on the shelf and when an order came in, they’d fill that order. They also handled all the retailer orders. This allowed us to capitalize on the fact that they handled several brands: retailers could order multiple brands in a single order. But it also meant we didn’t have a relationship with the fabulous people who sell our products. If you asked us if a store had products on order, we didn’t know. This also had the effect that our visibility on inventory was sometimes lacking. 

While we are overwhelmingly grateful for the eight years of partnership with our California-based manufacturer and fulfillment provider, recent shifts in the industry and the ever-growing complexities of global operations have presented some logistical headwinds. We recognize that these factors occasionally resulted in friction for our customers. To ensure a dramatically smoother experience moving forward, we are implementing a centralized inventory system and moving to professional fulfillment partners. These changes are designed to provide greater visibility, efficiency, and reliably smooth transactions for all our wonderful customers.

As part of this transition, as of May 1, 2026, retailers will place orders directly with us. All retailer and direct orders will draw from the same centralized database for our inventory, which will be regularly verified by our third-party fulfillment partners. We’ve recently run into several issues where we oversold items and had to disappoint customers. We’re hoping these changes will bring an end to this.

The partners we’ll be working with have great turnaround time: most orders should ship within 24 business hours. And for US orders, we’ll be able to capitalize on the great shipping rates that our partner gets, so shipping costs will go down. 

And finally, one of the most exciting developments is that we’re working with a partner in the EU for fulfillment for all non-US distribution. This will bring prices down for a lot of our customers, between tariffs and shipping costs. We’re excited about this from a sustainability perspective, too -- shipping is one of the biggest parts of our ecological footprint, and anything we can do to decrease that is great. Unfortunately, this will be a work in progress, so not everything will be available with an EU shipper for a while. Read more about that in the It’s Gonna Take Some Time section.

But the song, er, product line remains the same, right?

Not exactly.

In the past we had the luxury of Just in Time manufacturing: we could build things out just as we needed them. That gave us a layer of flexibility and meant we could order, say, 100 Alia modules and then panel them as whatever people purchased.

That time has passed.

We’ve been working to decrease the number of SKUs we have over the past several months, in part with an eye to this transition. This makes it easier for us to keep stock of Alia in general, without having to guess how many of the less popular firmwares to panel. It also makes it far easier for our retailers since they don’t have to try to stock 7 versions of what is effectively the same module.

Similarly, we have stopped producing replacement panels. Between the cost of panels and the number of scratched panels we had to simply not sell, it was a huge waste of resources (financial and natural). Panels have been removed from the website, but platform overlays will remain available.

Finally, a number of older modules have been discontinued and won’t be built again. Due to the cost of shipping and taxes, we don’t anticipate shipping existing inventory to our EU fulfillment partner. These modules will continue to ship only from the US (but will be available for international shipping!). We’ll mark the product pages on the website so you know what you’re getting into when ordering something. We’ll have more information on this after the transition to the new partners.

A change is gonna come. When?

As of today, all physical products on our website are marked out of stock, and no orders will be taken. Plugins will continue to be available during this time.

We’re driving down to pick up our inventory the first week of May; we’ll process it all and then get it shipped to our new warehouse in Arizona. We anticipate this will take a couple of weeks while we get everything counted, labeled, boxed, shipped, and inventoried at the new spot.

The new fulfillment partner will scan everything in and that will push inventory totals to our website. As things become available from the shipper, they’ll show up on our site.

Specific updates of interest:

• We’ve had some logistical issues with shipping the Case of Steel. As a result, they are currently out of stock but we have some left; those will become available once more after this transition.

• We discontinued silver modules a while ago. We’re hoping to get rid of all silver inventory soon (each SKU carries storage overhead); silver lovers, watch for a sale in May or June to help rid us of the remaining modules.

• B-stock: we’ve had requests for B-stock sales in the past but we didn’t really have the option for this. That is changing; look for B-stock options to begin to show up on our website in June.

• We’re effectively cleaning out the closet; after eight years, we are sure there are things hiding in a corner somewhere. Watch our mailing list and discord server for first dibs on anything of interest.

For the moment, we are holding our prices steady while we understand the costs we’ll be facing. As you may expect, there are a lot of moving parts here.

It’s going to take some time

We’ve started to build products in the EU and we hope to begin offering these for sale starting in May, but this depends on bureaucracy and paperwork (though, as that goes, Latvia has been pretty great). We expect it will be a year or possibly even more before we have our full product line available to ship from our partner there.

Some things never change

Our customers are the best out there; we’ll extend our thank you now for your patience during this transition. We expect there will be some bumps in this road, but our commitment to you remains the same. Support, firmware updates, and customer service for existing products will continue as usual. We are here to answer any questions and help you sort out any issues; just drop us a line from the contact page.