About​

First Pass: single-material supply chain handling

When first established in 2012 the general goal was to help folks like Kickstarter winners and inspired inventors who want to start manufacturing their new idea. A lot of these folks have grand ambitions but quickly learn that actually making a real-world products is complex, costly, and nearly impossible to pull off in today’s world.

The United States has a lot of manufacturing capacity, but most of the accessible kind is at single-material parts shops. And most of those have learned the hard way that talking to random inventors is a waste of time and money.

So, Maker Redux built a “barrier web site” for everyday folks. The site would take money, holding it in escrow, to ensure the part maker should get paid. And blocking production until the inventor provided the proper engineering diagrams and specs to ensure all parties knew what was coming. And possibly holding parts for assembly arrangements.

This “sort of” worked but was found to still be too cumbersome for regular use by regular people. Perhaps we will try again later. But in 2019 that service was halted.

Second pass: hyper-local warehousing and fulfillment

Much was learned with the first service attempt. And it exposed a smaller and perhaps-easier need.

Most who “make” things, even at low volume, generally grow tired of the “warehouse and shipping” part of their business. They aren’t weaving a new rug or building a new toy, but are instead checking website multiple times a day and “rushing to ship” items when a sale is made. It is relentless and unstopping. Even if you only sell one or two items a month, the customer still expects instant shipping.

For medium and large businesses there is already answer for taking this tedium away: a “3F” warehouse. You fill a shipping container or shrinkwrap some pallets filled with product and send it to the 3F warehouse. They take care of everything else, including shipping. But this only works for large volumes because of the labor overhead.

So, the “hyper-local dark warehouse” concept was born. Details are still being worked on, but one unit of product can be placed into the warehouse when the seller drives up to a big thing that looks like an oversized ATM machine.