Maker of Blocks modular smartwatch, unveiled at CES in 2015, says it's on track to deliver units to all its Kickstarter backers within the next few months
Context & Ripple Effects
Blocks unveiled its modular smartwatch at CES in January 2015, announced the campaign that summer, and by October had quickly blown past its $250K Kickstarter goal, promising a May 2016 shipment with a $195 core module or $250-plus bundles. That deadline came and went without delivery.
Two years later the company says all backers should have units within months. The comparison point in the corpus is unflattering: Pebble Time launched on Kickstarter at $159 and shipped to every backer within weeks of funding in mid-2015 — the same window in which Blocks was still pre-production.
First-order effects
- Backers who paid $195–$250 in October 2015 receive hardware roughly two years after the promised May 2016 date, closing out one of the longer delivery arcs among 2015's smartwatch crowdfunding projects.
- Blocks' modular pitch now lands in a market where scheduled rivals like LG's webOS watch were targeted for early 2016 — meaning the product arrives long after the category's 2015 cohort was supposed to be settled.
Second-order effects
- Every month of delay erodes the core differentiator: modules that seemed novel in 2015 must compete against whatever the incumbents shipped during the gap, pressuring Blocks on price and software rather than form factor alone.
- Pebble's on-time fulfillment sets the benchmark backers now apply to hardware campaigns, making Blocks' slip a data point other creators will be measured against when setting ship-date promises.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, hardware crowdfunding consolidates around creators who treat delivery dates as binding commitments, while slow movers find later campaigns discounted by backers who price in slippage — shifting the platform's role from pure funding toward de facto pre-orders.
The trend: Consumer-hardware crowdfunding is being judged less on the idea than on fulfillment speed, with Pebble-style on-time shipping becoming the standard against which campaigns like Blocks are measured.