One of my resolutions for the New Year is to become much more revealing in the Wandertec Blog. My goal in this is to try to get to the guts of what happens here at Wandertec. I hope the readers of this Blog will find this perspective an interesting and revealing example of a start up business.
Wandertec, Inc. is a small start-up business. Wandertec, Inc. is owned primarily by myself, Josh Lipton. Other owners include my family and some friends including Ben Robinson who designed the Wandertec website. I work full time to operate the business and have one part time employee.
I started down the path of developing the CELLO in 1998. In 2003 I formerly created the business Wandertec. In 2005 I first began selling the CELLO. In 2006 I also launched a subsidiary business to Wandertec. This is the website BikeTrailerShop.com.
To date, 40 CELLOS have been purchased. While this is a very modest number, the word is slowly getting out there. The majority of our revenue stream has been coming in through the BikeTrailerShop.com. This has been very helpful allowing me to both work full time and to hire a part-time employee.
With that brief introduction, I will get straight to our current operations. At the moment, I’m working on plans to expand my workshop. I recently purchased a house on the east side of Flagstaff that is zoned residential with a commercial overlay. Currently we are set up in the small (360 square foot) shop. In the coming months, I will be adding on a 700 square foot addition. With this addition we will have plenty of room for both CELLO and Bike Trailer Shop inventory and our main manufacturing tool, the ShopBot.
Another important project is organizing all of the parts of the CELLO into our new accounting setup – QuickBooks Manufacturing Edition. This should be very helpful in streamlining the manufacturing of the CELLO. We are working towards a more efficient production philosophy of Just-In-Time manufacturing as described in the book “Lean Thinking”.
One of the advantages of Just-In-Time manufacturing is that new designs and improvements can be implemented as they are developed. Every CELLO off our assembly line will have some small incremental improvements applied as they are developed, rather than having to wait for the new “model” to become available.
Check back next week to find out what is burning on Wandertec’s hot plate.