WAZER HQ Move

A History of WAZER Workspaces

June 1, 2020

WAZER started with two founders at a kitchen table in New York City. From there we expanded the company to four and took over the shed in the backyard. Shortly thereafter we joined Hax Accelerator and moved to Shenzhen, China for the next two years. During this time we were working closely with the suppliers who would ultimately manufacture our parts, designing and redesigning based on their capabilities. We always planned to assemble the machines in the US so we began searching for a production facility in the New York area. This first search yielded a space that would have worked for us but right as we were getting ready to move back to New York that deal fell through. 

At this point we had a container with the parts for the first forty WAZERs getting ready to leave the port in China. The rush was now on to find a space that we could set up to at least build the first batch of our Kickstarter machines. Fortunately we were able to secure a short-term lease for 3,000 sq ft of warehouse space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in a building that hadn’t even fully opened. We began production as they completed the building around us. 

While we were setting up our assembly operation we kept looking for a place we could make our own. We eventually found a great location in central Yonkers, and then spent the next six months negotiating a multi year lease. Eventually we had to cut our losses and call it quits as it was clear the landlord wasn’t willing to lease the space after all. Last fall we found a third space that met all our requirements and signed a lease. After four months of renovations and a month of COVID lockdown, we were finally ready to move in!

The New Facility

The new space is 12,000 sq-ft, located just north of downtown Yonkers. It has large rooms that we will set up for production, an open office and warehousing and smaller rooms for dedicated shops and meetings. The old Brooklyn warehouse was one large room, whereas this new layout allows us to have purpose-built spaces that will each be far more functional.

[pic: production, studio, warehouse and office]. 

With the floorplan completed our China team sourced industrial shelving and warehouse equipment that allowed us to use every square foot efficiently, saving us around $50,000 in buildout costs. The new layouts were also set up in a way to allow for future growth and expansion. 

This was also a great opportunity to rethink the flow of parts and assemblies, from the arrival of the container to the packed units going out the door. Speaking of doors, perhaps the most exciting thing about this space is that we have four loading dock bays just for us! The Brooklyn warehouse had a shared loading dock with a single freight elevator accessing it. This created a serious bottleneck in our operation, sometimes sinking hours of unexpected loading and unloading time. 

The Move

When you have a global pandemic going on, nothing is business as usual, and our move was no different. The go ahead to start moving into the new space didn’t come until the peak of the lockdown here in New York, but that didn’t matter because we were never going to hire professional movers anyway - we rented a truck and started packing up the warehouse, production cells, office and workshops . We moved everything ourselves with one 26-ft Penske truck (another $50,000 saved). What we thought would be twelve truckloads ended up being twenty four packed-to-the-ceiling truckloads (we are still puzzled as to how we were so off, but maybe that's just one of those unexplainable moving marvels we have all been through). 

Now this spread out over a month or two wouldn’t be so bad, but we did this in the span of ten days, since we only had a short overlap between the two leases. We also did this with 5-8 people per day at the height of the COVID lockdown. 

We are having a great time setting up the facility and making sure things are done right; they are for us to enjoy and benefit from for a long time! 

Thankfully, we have a large amount of pent up demand for WAZERs from around the world so we are hiring as fast as we can and building the production line to be better than it ever was before. We’ll have many coming updates about this in future posts!