What’s going on at the Rite Company, makers of the crowdfunded Rite Press coffee maker? As of this morning, backers on Kickstarter say they still haven’t received their “no-mess” French presses, the company’s website is down and an email The Spoon sent to the company’s CEO bounced back to us. We are in the midst of investigating the situation.
For those new to the saga, Rite Press started as a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in March of 2018, crowdfunding $1.3 million. But then in February of this year, almost a year after the Rite Presses were supposed to ship, we reported on how backers still hadn’t received their units and Sargam Patel, CEO of the Rite Company, had asked backers for an additional $30 each to fulfill the orders. The situation was aggravated in May of this year when the Rite Press website launched, allowing people to buy the Rite Press directly from the company. Customers who did so would get their Rite Presses first and help fund the fulfillment of outstanding pledges.
That Rite Press website is now down, and evidently has been for about a week and a half. According to a GoDaddy message on the site: “This domain name expired on 8/22/2019 and is pending renewal or deletion.”
Based on backer comments like this one on Kickstarter, many customers still haven’t gotten theirs:
Has the Rite Company finally been ground down? We reached out to Patel via email over the weekend, but as noted, our message bounced back, which would make sense if the web and email domains are no longer active. We also reached out to him via LinkedIn.
We will update this story as we learn more.
