October 2, 2013
StickerGiant had the pleasure of connecting with Carlos Neumann of Zometool this week to discuss the extent of the flood damage they experienced and to learn about ways to help:
1. Where is your company located?
1040 Boston Ave in Longmont
2. What does your company do?
We manufacture and sell Zometool; a cool building toy for kids —and Nobel Prize winners.
Zometool is used in homes and schools (K-PhD) all over the world; over half of our sales go overseas to markets like Germany, South Korea, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan.
Zometool is manufactured in Longmont using wind-powered electricity and is guaranteed for life (we replace broken parts for free for life).
3. What specifically affected your company during the flood? Property damage? Inventory loss? Personnel?
- Fortunately, all of our personnel is OK.
- Property damage:
We had to replace our power transformer, tear out all the drywall (cleanup service was $14k!), our forklift was damaged as was our backup production system (some of the molds with which we produce parts) and we are still in the process of re-habilitating our main production system (injection-molding machines) which were partially submerged.
- Inventory Damage:
We lost a lot of printed material and paperboard packaging.
Our core product is plastic, but a lot of it was soiled by dirty water. We have hundreds of thousands of parts which will have to be cleaned before we can ship them out.
We lost quite a bit of labor in the form of "ready to ship" inventory which got dirty. The kits now have to be disassembled and washed, after which we will have to re-count, re-bag and reassemble.
4. How can the local community help you to rebuild? What needs to be fixed? What would you need to resume business as usual?
- We could use help counting and bagging parts, this is repetitive but not difficult work which requires sustained attention for long periods. We have 2 counting scales available for this.
- Cash is a huge concern, as I imagine it must be for others affected; buying a kit from our website (Xmas gift?) would be a HUGE help; our product is most popular with kids 6-12 as well as with adults 31+ (appeals to both genders whether kid or adult).
Don't forget to check out our event to benefit local businesses effected by the flood here: https://hopshelp.eventbrite.com/
