Our Story
How we got here
We had a contact through our social network who'd been in the inductor business for 40 years. He needed parts built and was willing to show us how the industry worked. What kind of equipment we'd need, for example.
But we were on our own when we decided to set up a winding facility in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We chose it for its ties to U.S. commerce and its deep labor pool of educated technicians and engineers.
It took us about two years and a few expensive lessons to bring a top level team together across time zones. What is a top level team? Well, there's levels to the answer (of course) but in one phrase, it's a team that has been repeatedly tested by fire and emerged wiser, faster, and more trustworthy. That's a high bar. We're glad we held it.
So, the team came together. And after a time, we set out, in search of our first client.
Our first client was NK Technologies in San Jose, a company specializing in current sensors for industrial power monitoring. How did it happen? We approached them cold and got a lunch meeting with their buyer. She liked us enough to bring her CTO to a second lunch. We sat down across the table from two experienced manufacturing executives and told them the truth: one of us is a university professor, the other a psychotherapist, and we built an inductor company from scratch.
They laughed. Then they gave us their drawings.
As we do in this business, we swiftly converted their drawings into samples, delivered them, and found out the next day that they'd passed every test in NK's lab. NK placed their first production order that month. We've been supplying them ever since.
Today we review the test data on every batch of inductors we wind personally. We video call our winding floor during production runs. And we do jazz parties for team birthdays.
Joe Engels & Khuyen Nguyen
Co-Founders & Co-CEOs