Get A Free P-38

Get a free P-38 (Best Army Invention Ever) if you sign up for our mailing list!  Click this link:

Free P-38

We’d love for you to repost this link on facebook, moto bulletin boards, local moto clubs and email listservs, or just email it around to your moto buddies.  That’s what we’re hoping will happen.  As long as the people signing up have bikes and love to ride them, we’re happy to send out thousands of these if we can.  I just ordered 200 more.  Any great ideas for somewhere to promote this?  Let us know, or better yet post the link yourself.  Who wouldn’t want a free P-38?

If you’ve never heard of a P-38, it’s this really badass little can opener that was designed by the US military in 1942 for K rations in World War II.  The P-38 was standard issue with military meals for over 60 years before the MRE (Meal Ready Eat) took over.  These little tools, nicknamed the “John Wayne” in the military, are legendary for reliability and toughness.  Andrew and I were looking for a cool giveaway and I remembered this surplus P-38 I had for 10+ years when I was a kid.  Um, yeah… perfect!!

We’re doing this promotion for two reasons: 1) we’re trying to build a mailing list of riders in anticipation of having some product to sell soon and 2) we want to learn more about who is following our blog and advrider.com thread, and how far their network extends.  The advrider thread has had over 42,000 views, which is a lot.  We’re curious who you are, where you’re located, what kind of bike you ride, and what ideas you might have for us.  So we’ll trade a few hundred (or thousand?) P-38’s to find out.  Everyone needs a P-38 right?  Coolest little backcountry utensil ever.

Learning more about this network is particularly timely because we’ve decided to sell direct-to-consumer.  Originally we just kind of assumed we’d be selling through retailers/distributors since that’s how other companies do it.  But as we watched the online response and feedback building over the last few months we started wondering: why sell through retailers if we can connect directly with riders?  Retailers take a 35-50% markup, so our products would cost nearly double in stores, plus we’d be one-step removed from the customer.  We posed this question on advrider.com and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of selling direct.  So that’s what we’ll do.

Until now we’ve been focused solely on the designs themselves, while sales, marketing, warehousing, etc seemed way off on the horizon to be dealt with later.  Now that we’re about to place our first purchase order, which is a lot of money for us, suddenly the “later” is now.  Nothing brings sales into focus like owning a bunch of inventory.

For packing/shipping, we have some good friends in Hood River with a really cool ski/snowboard brand that’s been growing fast (Trew Gear.  FYI their post season sale is on, 45% off everything. Check it out, seriously good stuff).  They started 5 years ago and since then have experimented with a couple different warehouse options, mostly picking/packing products themselves.  Last year they switched to a third party logistics company in Portland for their warehousing and shipping.  On their recommendation, Andrew and I headed into the city for a visit.

Letting someone else handle shipping is a mental leap.  I’ve managed a shipping warehouse in the past, so this is not unfamiliar territory.  But for a small company like us, working with a third-party logistics partner can result in faster shipping, fewer mis-ships, more accurate inventory, and lower costs than we could ever hope to achieve on our own.  A lot of small companies are going this route.  Big ones too apparently, since this warehouse’s biggest customer is Nike.  By partnering with a logistics company, Andrew and I will be able to spend more time on product and design, while leaving warehousing and shipping to the pros.  We’re liking this idea.

While in PDX we also visited a motorcycle salvage yard just outside of town.  We’ve been looking for a junker bike to use in our upcoming crash test.  The idea is to test the pannier mounting system and the armor by attaching some panniers to a bike and pushing it out of the back of my pickup at speed.  Maybe when it gets a little warmer out.  We found a sweet vintage CB 175.  No motor, but it still rolls, which is all we need for this project.  Maybe we’ll put some cinder blocks where the engine would go to add a little weight.

Then:

And now:

In other news: Andrew is working hard to get our design revisions for the factory.  The revisions are small and detailed, but numerous.  Meanwhile Galen finished up the size specs for our 2015 apparel.  Factory #1 (from the last post, who I met in Hanoi) has agreed to produce our apparel, which is exciting news.  Andrew, Galen, and I Skyped with them last week to discuss fabrics and production timing.

Did I mention the Free P-38??

Cut, Sew, & Snails

March 11, 2014

All the apparel factories I found were located on the outskirts of Hanoi, so I hopped on a plane and headed north for a couple of days.  Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, is older, colder, and darker than Saigon.  Sort of like Vietnam’s version of the Pacific Northwest.  Rainy, but charming.

There was an outdoor cafe down the street from my hotel, so I ordered some fried frog, peanuts, and beer and watched the chaos of Hanoi unfold around me.

On Friday morning I visited a motorcycle apparel company that I was very excited to see.  It’s a Gore certified plant making products for some well-established brands.  We’d been referred to them by several different sources.  As motorcycle apparel companies go, this is definitely the varsity team.  

I was very impressed.  The challenge we face is that we’re a small startup and they’re a big established company (4,200 people in this factory alone).  Their production lines are busy and they don’t “need” new business.  Plus they’re used to selling in very high volume and they have no way of knowing whether we’ll grow.  From our standpoint though, we need a factory like this behind us if we want to create a truly premium product.  It was an excellent visit and the dialog has continued since, which I take to be a good sign.

By coincidence, Galen (who is designing our apparel line) just happened to be in Hanoi that night with one of his associates working on a helmet project, so we went to the same cafe I found the other night and enjoyed some frog, peanuts, cuddlefish, and beer.  And then went bar hopping around Hanoi.

The next day I visited a cut & sew factory which makes snowmobile gear, among other things.  This factory was located about 2.5 hours south of Hanoi, so we had a nice tour of the countryside on the way.

I enjoyed the visit and my hosts were great, but the factory’s capabilities were not the right fit for our products.  That night I headed back to Hanoi to have dinner with a third factory, another motorcycle specialist, and then took the day off on Sunday to catch up on emails before returning to HCMC.  It was a short trip to Hanoi, but a helpful one in terms of framing the challenges and opportunities ahead in apparel.  For now, we’ll keep our fingers crossed for a successful partnership with factory #1.

When I returned to HCMC on Sunday, Anton, David, and the R&D team had made a bunch of progress on our samples.  Got my Minsk back.  That’s Anton’s SR400 sitting next to it in the pic below.  These bikes really stand out in HCMC, where 99% of the traffic is scooters.

The first round sample of our smaller pannier looks good.  It’s too small, however, so we need to add some volume.  The current size is approximately 15L and we were shooting for 20-22L, so that’s something we’ll fix in our revisions.

David showed me how to test whether a fabric is nylon or polyester, by lighting it on fire.

The second-round sample of the smaller duffle looks great.  Anton made some changes to the removable backpack/shoulder strap system.

We spent a lot of time going over our cut/stapled/taped first draft “frankenstein” prototype of the rackless bag, which Andrew sent over in a hurry so we could review it with Anton before I left.  That’s Andrew on Skype on the laptop.

Here’s where we stand on our designs so far, with the rackless prototype soon to follow.  The next step is to choose the actual colors/fabrics.  We’ve been getting a lot of requests for a black-oriented colorway on advrider.com, so that’s the direction we’re currently leaning.

Before I left to come home to the states, Anton and his girlfriend took me out for a tasty dinner of beer, clams, snails, fish-on-a-stick, and unhatched baby chickens, among many other things.

And with that, my trip to Vietnam was over.  I hopped on the 21 hour flight back to Portland and the Gorge.  After spending 6 of the last 7 weeks in 5 different countries, it feels good to be home.

And as a bonus, it’s sunny.

Machine Shop Shopping

March 1, 2014

I rented a motorbike and spent a few days darting around the industrial suburbs of Ho Chi Min City in search of machine shops.  This was a great excuse to explore parts of the city that I wouldn’t otherwise get to see, and it turned out to be quite productive as well.  We’re expecting a bunch of price quotes over the next few weeks.

Here’s a quick video captured by my iphone in a running armband.

We’re trying to find out how much it would cost to make the mounting plates and brackets overseas.  We received quotes from several machine shops in the U.S. and they were very high.  Using the lowest-cost US quote we’ve received so far, the mounting plates would cost approximately 1.5 times more than the actual bags themselves.

I really had no idea what to expect when I set out on this search.  There was lots of sitting around tables, staring at the parts.

There are many professional machine shops and molding factories in Vietnam.  I also saw a few that were backwards and old, but most had modern machinery making complex parts for the US and European markets.  Some shops had been around for a while, with several generations of machinery in operation, from aging hand-controlled stand-up to ultra-modern brand-new CNC, and everything in between.

Coffee break.  At the street stalls, iced coffee is often served with an accompanying cup of tea.

Laser-engraving: “LL Bean.”

Saw one of the D rings we’re using in production.

Here’s the finished part.

A compilation of some video snapshots from inside the factories.

One day I had a guide, Sebastien, who owns a recycling business in HCMC.  He knows a lot of machine shops and factories because be buys and recycles their scrap.  In my day with Sebastien we rode 150+ kilometers through Saigon traffic, him on his scooter and me on my minsk.

After a few days exploring machine shops, I regrouped with Anton at the bag factory and we reviewed the first-round proto of our reduced-size duffle, which is coming along nicely.  We were shooting for 30L but the proto came back way too big.  They’re working on a revised version for next week.

To experiment with the desired dimensions, we reduced the volume of our proto by clipping it with plastic clips.  We’re also experimenting with the quick-disconnect backpack/shoulder strap system in the pics below.

We’re messing with some ideas for making our own version of molle stix out of PE board.  More to come on that.

Anton and I had a fun night out.  The pic below is from an Irish Pub in HCMC called Bernie’s.  Kiki (in the pic) and her husband are the owners.  Good whiskey is nice to find.

Now I’m in Hanoi, in northern Vietnam where it’s cold and rainy, searching for an apparel factory.  More on that next week.