Samantha Taylor: Welcome to the Amigo CartCast, the podcast where we roll through the ins and outs of material handling with amigo cartoons. I’m your host, Samantha Taylor, here with my co-host Scott Chappell, and we’re on a mission to find a better way for material handling.

Scott Chappell: Thank you, Samantha. Each episode, we’ll explore the innovative features, success stories, and the endless possibilities that amigo material handling carts bring to the table. Let’s roll into a world of efficiency, innovation, and endless possibilities. This is the Amigo CartCast.

Samantha Taylor: Welcome to another episode of the Amigo CartCast. I might see this every time, but this could be my favorite episode because we have a very special guest today. Jen, who is our Director of New Business Development and Business Development here at Amigo, has been part of the Amigo family literally since the day she was born. So we have Jen in studio and Scott is calling in out on the road.

So welcome, Jen, and thanks for joining us.

Jennifer Kehres: You’re making me blush. She just says I’m her favorite because I’m sitting right across from her right now.

Samantha Taylor: No, that is not true. That is not true.

Jennifer Kehres: Well, this is my favorite podcast I’ve ever been a part of. So thank you. And I think my first but still my favorite.

Scott Chappell: Well, she says favorite for every guest that we have, so don’t get too wound up about it.

Jennifer Kehres: Well, I’ve only heard it today for me, so I’m taking it.

Samantha Taylor: Perfect. I do enjoy when we have guests because it really paints a picture of all the different people that are kind of behind our products. I know we’ve talked about that in the past, so what we want to discuss today with Jen specifically is how our industrial line came to be. She’s been a huge part of growing this market for us.

Jennifer Kehres: So my parents started Amigo in 1968, and I officially started with the company, I think, 17 years ago. I haven’t been around quite as long as Scotty, but I’m catching up to him. And I started in marketing, and I spent some time in retail sales to grocery stores with a focus on international and then back in marketing.

And today I’m over business development, so that over encompasses, oversees our marketing team and any new business opportunities. Part of that is looking at what’s next and what’s next in the future. So when Amigo Mobility got started in 1968, we were created to help people with disabilities, and that’s what we did for the first few decades. That primarily was our only focus.

We did a little bit with selling motorized shopping carts to grocery stores, but that switch didn’t really flip until the mid to late 2000s, when insurance changed and healthcare got more difficult. So we focused completely, mostly on retail and grocery stores selling motorized shopping carts. What we found is that we need to always be looking to the next 50 years, in the next 50 years, to make sure that our company keeps growing and keeps supporting our local community and manufacturing products right here in Michigan.

That’s something we’re very passionate about and care about, that we want to keep the company going. So when we’re looking at what’s the next thing for us in 2015, 2016, we had some other products that were out in the market that led us to developing the industrial sales network. But actually in the 1980s, which I say material handling, I can now officially say started before me.

We bought a product called the JET product line that was in another company in Michigan. They sold the product line. And so in the mid to early 80s, they had three different models, one for security, one for material handling, and one for hospitals. We had a full-time salesperson, but it didn’t really take off. We didn’t make it a focus because at the time, we were getting into franchising for our healthcare mobility carts.

So that product line didn’t get too far then, but it’s ironic that we have this history with this. It was almost like there was a visionary here that knew that this was going to be another avenue for Amigo, that visionary being Al Thieme, my dad. So in 2016, 2015, we were testing out a small grocery cart retriever in grocery stores, and that product fetched carts and brought them in.

So we called it the Max. And it really wasn’t the right time for the right product that we needed. So that didn’t go too far. So our R&D manager worked on putting a deck on that and was testing it at a local hotel to move luggage. So when people checked in, the bellhop could take this motorized cart to move luggage to their rooms.

So we kind of tested that out a little bit, looked at it, and as a company, we were seeing, all right, what do we do with these products? And we really dug in and did a little bit of research and looked at what we’re good at and how we want to grow, and we packaged these products, redid them a little bit, added a few more, and decided to do a focus on the industrial market.

So we created these, not specifically for hotels, not specifically for grocery stores—we were already in that market—but really redesigned them with the focus to be in an industrial setting. So I worked very closely with Al Bussinger, our R&D manager at the time. I mean, I remember many meetings in his office just pulling up a chair next to his desk as he’s in CAD, designing it, doing a lot of tests out in the field to get it right.

So it started with the Max and Max Pro, and then we added the Dex and the Dex Pro. And today, how many products do we have in the line?

Samantha Taylor: Scott, you want to take that one?

Scott Chappell: Of course I will. Of course, I mean you got me sitting in the corner here. I haven’t said a thing yet, but we’ve got five products currently today that we offer.

Jennifer Kehres: Okay. Yeah. And so the Max, we don’t have that right now, but we have the Max Pro and then some others. So we have both walk-behind and stand-on products to have. But yeah, when we started it was only, I think, four products. So it was… it felt a little bit like swimming upstream because not only were we creating one new product at Amigo, which we do often, but we were creating a family of products and a whole new sales network.

And so there was a lot of research and very helpful people out in the field. We went to some trade shows, some rep networking events to see what is the best way to sell in this market. So we have learned a lot, and the tides really turned in 2017 when Scott Chappell stopped by Amigo.

Scott Chappell: Oh, stop.

Jennifer Kehres: And I invited him to lunch. And here we are, how many years later, with him having his own podcast? Yeah, yeah, in this market.

Scott Chappell: Seven years later. You know, Jen, I think part of this that kind of was missed a little bit is that when your dad originally talked to the company about the JET to try to get our sit-down product going for folks in healthcare, how all of a sudden that was, ironically, a stand-up product back then in the 1960s.

And then all of a sudden we, your father, create a sit-down product with the components, and then all of a sudden, in 2016, 17, we decide that we want to go back to a stand-up. So here we are, a company in healthcare and in grocery/commercial with sit-down products, and all of a sudden now we are stand-up.

Did that come into play with you at all? I mean, why, when you started this, did we go stand-up? I guess is my question.

Jennifer Kehres: Al Thieme, that visionary, he was thinking 50 years in the future.

Scott Chappell: Yes, yes. He was.

Jennifer Kehres: I don’t know. This is the first product line that we have designed not specifically for people with disabilities, which everything else we’ve done in Amigo’s past have been designed to help people with disabilities. So this was really different for us. And when you think about efficiency and safety and using them and testing them in our own facility here, when you stand up to drive something, you’re more engaged, you have better visibility, you can see things better, you can get on and off the cart quicker.

So it really made a lot of sense to be a stand-up cart. And also, it’s different than what’s out in the market right now. I mean, you look at a lot of the comparable motorized material handling carts, and they are sit-down. And that’s been an advantage to some of the facilities we go in. The people who look at it and see, they say, oh, this makes so much sense that it is a stand-up cart and it would be safer and more engaging for our facility.

Scott Chappell: I agree 100%. And you started this at ’16. Obviously, I came back in ’17 after being in healthcare for a long, long time. So I was on the other side of the fence. I’m just going to tell everybody, kind of the personal side of it for me was when I started in 1989, and helping people at that time, the folks that needed help with accessibility and so on.

It was new for me, and it was a breath of fresh air. So on a personal note, I was able to start growing that healthcare in Bridgeport, Michigan, out of our local store in 1990. Well, in 2017, and I’ve told this story many times, this product line for Scott, Scott only when I came in back to work with you, Jen, was another breath of fresh air.

It felt like 1990 all over again.

Jennifer Kehres: Oh wait, wait, was that the product line or me?

Scott Chappell: Well, it was both, it was both, but it was, it was both. But, I’m just telling you from a professional standpoint. Yeah, I in 2017 started growing this like we did in 1990 at the local store, and that’s what’s really driven me even today. I mean, I love this product line. It’s so unique. It’s new, it’s fresh.

People don’t know anything about it. And that’s the biggest part of this, of what I do daily that I really enjoy.

Jennifer Kehres: Yeah. And why you’re the perfect person, you know, to join forces and kick this off. Because you’re right. It’s exactly what you did back in the 90s. And get something new rolling. And that’s kind of what Amigo’s good at is that we do something that’s unique that people haven’t seen before. And as we say, they don’t know that they need yet.

You know, in 1968, we had the very first mobility cart for people with disabilities, and before that, people were typically pushed around in a wheelchair. My dad was a plumbing and heating contractor at the time, didn’t have any manufacturing or engineering experience, but he saw a need. He knew there must be a better way.

And he was swimming upstream for many, many years, convincing people that, yes, I’m a plumber who invented this product, but there is a need and it will make lives better. And, you know, here we are, 50-plus years later, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world use a product like this to get around and use it for mobility.

It just took a while to be accepted and for people to recognize and see that this is a benefit and fills a need. Then we did the same thing with motorized shopping carts in grocery stores. Typically, people with a disability may not be able to shop, and the ADA act did help a lot with that accessibility and driving it.

But really, in the mid to late 2000s, when more and more grocery stores started putting motorized shopping carts in their stores, accessibility became something that was required. And, you know, they didn’t want any barriers to shopping. So now every grocery store you go into has a motorized shopping cart, with the majority being Amigo. Thank you. But it just took a little while to get that out there.

So we made the first motorized shopping cart in 1970. And I don’t think it was till the late 2000s that you started seeing them as standard in grocery stores. So I truly believe that this material handling product line in industrial settings is the same thing. We are filling a gap in the market. There’s the small material handling carts or the push carts, or there’s the larger ones that retail for 15, 20, $30,000 or more.

And we saw a need for the mid-sized material handling cart. You know, let’s right-size your equipment. Let’s find the right product for you. So, you know, every time we do a demo and go out, or at least I used to hear a lot, “This is something we didn’t even know that we needed. We didn’t even see the gap in our efficiency for this.”

And I just know it’s this little snowball that we started rolling. It’s going to pick up more and more momentum going down that hill. And this is going to be a big chunk of the material handling market. These sized products. But we create something unique, and we’re good at that and we’re passionate about that. And it’s going to carry us through for the next 50 years.

Samantha Taylor: This conversation is going so well with some amazing content that we are going to wrap it up here as a two-part episode. So this will conclude episode one of two parts. Stay tuned for our next episode to be released shortly.

And that wraps up another episode of the Amigo CartCast. We hope you enjoy this exploration into finding a better way for material handling with Amigo carts. Be sure to subscribe as well as go to myamigo.com/podcast to see pictures and videos mentioned in today’s episode.

Scott Chappell: Thank you for tuning in and until next time, keep rolling with Amigo.

Samantha Taylor: Until next time.

Scott Chappell: Keep it rolling.

Samantha Taylor: Keep it rolling.