MakeBlock visit
It was a wonderful morning as we were excited to go and see the home of Makeblock – see Alice again and meet the founder: Jasen Wang.
There was an indoor market on the ground floor of the building that houses Makeblock (we heard a large number of chickens) and the rest of the floors seemed to be filled with offices built out of glass panelling on top of marble floors.
Makeblock has grown over the past year and now has three of such glass holdings: one for the designers and the engineers, one for the sales and marketing team and one for storage and packaging.
We were charmed by the constructed designs packed in one of the offices and had sneak-peeks at some of the kits that are being developed and some of the parts for which they are still optimizing the production process. They are organizing monthly construction contests – and have developed a full educational kit (contact them if you are in education).
We discussed some gear-designs and were impressed by their production standards and their dedication to finding a manufacturer that can produce exactly according to the specifications. We think this collection of youngsters is unproving the idea that only cheap crap is made in China – they remind us more of our friendly German designers and its culture of Deutsche Grundlichkeit The product is made Design First, it is thoroughly tested and standards are not lowered to cut on costs. Over the past year their products have become better and more polished.
In the storage and packing part we met the father-of-the-founder who was packing DC-motors in individual wrappers. Our very own father-of-the-founder sat down at the table with him to help. The storage consists of a few racks with plastic blue boxed containing lots of goodies. We bought a stack of the new aluminium beams and have instantly made plans for a pick-and-place machine.
Meeting the team and seeing them at work has made us even bigger fans of Makeblock – “Enthusiastic young people with lots of attention to detail” – we hope that this company continues to thrive and will continue our support.
Much extrusion, such precision, very stepper; wow!
Check out a video of our visit below:
