Made in the USA
We tried it the other way once. It cost us forty thousand dollars and a shipping container that is still at the bottom of the ocean.
Before COVID, we did what a lot of manufacturers do. Somebody ran the numbers, the numbers looked good, and we had a run of product made overseas. It was not a decision anybody agonized over. On paper it was obvious.
The container went on a ship. The ship went down. Not metaphorically — the cargo went over the side and the vessel sank, and our product went with it. Then we found out what marine cargo insurance actually covers, which in our case turned out to be nothing. Forty thousand dollars, gone, with no product and no recourse.
You can call that bad luck. We called it a lesson about how many links there are in a chain you do not control.
What we build now, and where
Every machine we sell is built in New York. The tanks, the generators, the assembly — all of it, here, by people we can walk over and talk to. When a transducer specification changes because a blind manufacturer sent us a new textile, that change happens in a building we can drive to, not in an email chain across eleven time zones.
It costs more. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and anybody who tells you domestic manufacturing is secretly cheaper is selling something. What it buys is control: over the quality, over the timeline, and over what happens when something goes wrong.
Every generator we ship runs for seventy-two straight hours before it leaves the building. You cannot do that with a container you have never seen.
The part that still gets us shouting at the television
There is a moment on those investment shows where somebody has built a real product, and the first advice out of the panel is to have it made overseas to get the margin up. We have opinions about that moment.
Not because domestic manufacturing is patriotic decoration. Because that advice skips everything that happens after the first order — the revisions, the warranty claims, the customer who calls at nine at night because something is not working right and needs an answer from somebody who actually knows how the thing was put together.
We build equipment for people who bet their income on it. A blind cleaning operator whose generator fails in week three does not have a spare, does not have a backup plan, and has customers waiting. That is not a scenario where we want to be explaining lead times to somebody.
What this means for you
When you buy a machine from us, the warranty is not a document you hope never to need. It is two years on the generator and ten years on the transducers, backed by the people who built it, in a country where you can reach them by phone during your own working hours.
That is the whole argument. It is not complicated, and after thirty-seven years it is not something we are willing to trade for a better unit cost.
Questions about the equipment itself? See what goes into it, or call and ask.