MAGFAST Family Update #48
As usual its been a busy week at MAGFAST:
Chief engineer Shawn Herzinger is on an extended visit to the Far East. He’s dropping in on a trade show and some other P3 business while he’s there but the key purpose of his visit, and the bulk of his time, is being spent with our local parters eTech and ProDigit focussed on MAGFAST engineering & production.
ProDigit has worked with P3 for years on their category-leader Kill-a-Watt, which – like MAGFAST Wall – both plugs into a home’s power outlets and provides sockets into which you can plug appliances. Sounds simple, but in practice requires astonishing care and small manufacturing tolerances. Safety is key as these products wind up semi-permanently plugged-in. ProDigit will be making Wall and also MAGFAST Air.
ProDigit started the work on MAGFAST Life, Extreme, Road and Time – the models with rechargeable batteries in – and as you’ll know, if you’ve been following along, settling on the right batteries (without ‘settling’) has been our greatest engineering challenge to date.
Like wall outlets, you’d think it would be simple – there’s chargers everywhere these days – but in a sense that’s the problem. Most power banks are kind of junk, so the abundant supply of junk batteries doesn’t help us.
The premium, brand-name suppliers have all of their output accounted for by the big guys like Apple and Samsung – so our choice of suppliers is narrow: The super-high quality guys who aren’t already at 100% capacity. Exacerbating this challenge is that our manufacturing quantities on individual items are still relatively small.
Yes, our launch was spectacular, but since then we’ve had our heads down focussed on building the backbone of the business so we can scale it up successfully when the time is now… Most products (Road, Life etc) are still at just a few thousand units, which is a small quantity from a production standpoint. Only Wall is approaching a 5-figure quantity order, because there’s 2 in each Pro Kit – and of course we offer Wall FREE to folks who come check out MAGFAST for the first time – and it’s the core of the ‘gifting’ program that many of you have been testing out!
Power banks – and the rechargeable batteries within them are hard… and that’s where eTech comes in. They are fast (comparatively – this is manufacturing remember) and they are aggressive and have strong experience in battery selection, power management systems, and safety.
So Shawn is hard at work in Shenzhen and Taipei co-ordinating ProDigit and eTech along with the myriad of other suppliers involved in a project the size of MAGFAST.
I’ll be able to give you an update fresh from Shawn when he returns.
Meanwhile, we’re working on all the other things we need to make MAGFAST successful at scale. Upgrading our web infrastructure and shopping cart are major items right now – along with working with FundAmerica on the investment offering.
