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Engineers Simon Curran and Tom Walters were looking for ideas to start their own company when inspiration struck from an unlikely source: their ultimate frisbee team.
Challenged to brighten up night-time games with high-visibility gear, the pair came up with a unique design — and set up a company, Noxgear, to sell their product. As they began developing their venture, they found a potential new market by marketing their products as safety wear.
We spoke to Simon and Tom about how they discovered a new audience for their product and the challenges they faced when scaling up the business.
Name: Simon Curran and Tom Walters
Business: Noxgear
Started: 2013
How did you go about creating your awesome job?
Simon: Tom and I had successful jobs working together at an aerospace firm in Buffalo, New York, and the company gave us a lot of freedom. We were doing well and making products faster than is typical in our industry, so we thought, "Let’s do something ourselves!"
We floated silly ideas around — including a portable juice blender — until, one day, our ultimate frisbee team challenged us to find an effective way to play in the dark. We started by taking apart a fiber optic Christmas tree to repurpose the lighting elements. We worked through the night and the next day and, by the time the game began that evening, we had finished a basic fiber optic colored light vest. A bunch of our fellow engineers used the vest on the field. Cars stopped, and people came out to the park to watch.
I think at that point we knew we’d stumbled across something unique!
Your product is now mainly marketed as safety gear for runners and cyclists rather than sports teams. What made you change focus?
Tom: We decided to offer both for our Kickstarter campaign, even though we were concerned about the confusion that could be caused by selling two similar products for different purposes. In the end, it was the right approach to take, because it highlighted how we were capable of building a business around the safety vest.
Simon: It was clear during that campaign that people were buying more of the safety vests and less of the night sports clothing.
How did you find your first customers?
Simon: There was a popular five-kilometer night run taking place in Dayton, Ohio, where we’re from, so we decided to create an initial design for the safety vest.
We worked in the garage until the last possible minute before heading to the race, totally drained, and wearing our first prototype. Afterwards, someone ran after us and said, “I have to find out what that thing is and where you got it!” We weren’t very prepared, but we gave him our email address — and he became our first customer.
Was there an exact moment when you knew your business would work?
Simon: For me, I never believed it wasn’t going to work. I never thought there’d be a time when we’d be throwing in the towel, calling it quits and going back to another job.
Was there anything that surprised you about starting your own business?
Simon: The first calculation that we made about how many runners and cyclists there are, and what percentage of the market we’d have to capture to make a million dollars — that was eye-opening.
How did you set prices for your products?
Simon: We learned that you need to engage your retailers and then never out-price them. Let the sales come through them. Either that, or you have to push hard on your own website by offering great discounts — like we do. But you do risk disappointing retailers if you undercut them on price.
Tom: At the beginning, we had very limited inventory. We were building the product ourselves and shipping it out. To sell at a low margin to retailers we needed a ton of volume, so that’s what drove the pricing and sales model early on.
Has it been a challenge to scale up production?
Tom: Discount production isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Don't be afraid to pay a little bit more to produce in the US if it means you have control and especially if it puts you in a better cash flow situation because you're not paying for large bulk orders — like we do.
But, we’re also very close to having an excellent production facility in China. You just have to make sure the boss really cares about your product.
How to keep yourselves organized as you're scaling your business?
Simon: When you start off as just two people like Tom and I, there's a lot of work you have to do to make sure nothing gets left behind, so we’ve gotten pretty good at making task lists. We use Wunderlist to share these with our employees and to easily add to their lists. Every day is about creating an ongoing list of actions to complete, sift through, prioritize and then moving on.
If you could go back in time, what’s the one thing you would do differently when you were starting your business?
Simon: A friend once told me that Tom and I should sit down, have a beer and talk about the business every month to make sure we’re on the same page.
We never did that. Then, at some point, I felt like I was doing a lot of the work and I wasn’t discussing this with Tom. It boiled up into a big fight. If we could rewind the clock, we would have started those regular meetings much sooner.
What would you like to learn today from a network of small business owners and self-employed professionals?
Tom: Maybe someone here could help us understand why giving money to a marketing firm is a good idea!
We’ve thought about it a couple times, but we've never taken the leap — and it’s always because they can’t convince us to buy their plan. We're engineers and we want to see proof and data showing how they could improve sales and deliver return on investment. So far we haven't received that.
Do *you* have tips for Simon and Tom that will help them decide where best to spend their marketing dollars?
Are you confident in your marketing approach? Do you have the raw stats that prove your success, and can you help these engineers build their customer base?
Brighten up Simon and Tom’s day by sharing your own experiences in the comments below! :-)
