RAM Mounts Visit

A little while back I had reason to be in the United States. When these things come up you should take the opportunity, so a visit to shake hands with the team at RAM Mounts very quickly became a central part of the trip. So what can we report?

Firstly, they're great hosts. I sat down and talked all the usual marketing strategies with them, and product development, and all the stuff that's probably fairly uninteresting, but in fact it was really a great visit.

I did a tour of the facility and it was as good as I thought. The place has a lot of machines that I guessed might date back to the 1950s, they're still doing the same job, there's a new extension opening up which has a bunch of new injection machines, and the high tech stuff will be great for the expansion that is inevitable for a product as good as this.

Probably the most surprising thing though, is the amount of humans involved in producing your RAM Mount. Apart from the operators who maintain and run the injection moulders, there are several points throughout the factory where parts come out of an automated process to be finished up by someone on a bench grinder, or the GDS stuff being hand soldered to finish up the wiring, or constant surveillance of the parts by quality assurance staff. In a town where the high tech industries are taking over, this is an employer who is offering people with older type skills a chance to join the workforce, and with growth going on, there are a bunch of them going from entry level to senior tasks. In a world where reorganisation means lots of people are losing their careers, and where much manufacturing is being outsourced to cheap labour environments, I'm happier than ever to be dealing with them.

We don't have to make our decisions based on how much we like our business partners' ethics. When we started selling RAM Mounts we were just happy that it's a product that works really well at a good price. Then we made an orderly offer to the market, and it sells well. As we went on we realised we get very few returns and that's always a bonus. Now we find out that there's a lot in the production that we really like for social reasons. All up, it's been a happy visit.