Do-It-Yourself industry in the U.S. is a $700 billion industry
Mark Hatch is the CEO, co-founder of TechShop, a former Green Beret and now, a Business901 Podcast Guest. He has held executive positions focused on innovation, disruptive technology and entrepreneurship at large and small firms alike. His background includes time with Avery Dennison and Kinko where he developed large scale technology platforms launching himself as a recognized leader in the Global Maker Movement. TechShop is the largest public access tools and computer enabled manufacturing platform in the world.
Mark recently authored The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers. He is my guest next week on the podcast and this is an excerpt.
Joe Dager: Mark, thanks for being here. The TechShop sounds pretty interesting, what is it all about?
Mark Hatch: Thanks Joe and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your listeners. TechShop is a membership based do-it-yourself open fabrication studio. Membership based means just like a gymnasium, like a 24 hour fitness or Gold’s Gym. We charge our members by the month $125. We then teach a lot of classes. We teach upwards of 250 classes in San Francisco on how to use the tools. Do-it-yourself means our members do it themselves; we don’t do it for them, we’re not the prototyping shop, they get to come in and use our tools and fabrication studio.
In San Francisco, we have 24,000 square feet; we have machine tools, mills and lathes, wood working tools, routers, drill, presses and great big CNC routers. Complete metal shops, complete electronics lab, complete plastics lab, complete textiles lab, 3D printers, great big huge water jet, 4,000 square feet of open space where you can use our air power tools and most importantly a thousand members in San Francisco alone. When you come to work on your project you are not working on it alone, and if you run into an issue or a problem, we like to say, you are probably one or two degrees of freedom from getting that problem solved. It’s a unique platform; nobody else has gone it at this scale. We have six locations now across the U.S., three in the Bay Area, Detroit, Austin and Pittsburgh.
Joe: Can you define who actually is a maker for me?
Mark: Well, somebody who makes things. It’s that simple. What’s nice is its very broad so a lot of people can participate and then what’s really interesting to me is that becoming a maker is getting easier and easier and easier. Just because you don’t think you can be, or you may not currently consider yourself a maker, if you work in software, for example, and you’re used to dealing with Microsoft Word or Excel or those things, you will soon, my guess, within the next five to six years you are going to be playing around with a parametric modeling software program. You may not even know that’s what it is but under the covers that’s what it will be and then you’ll have an opportunity to print those out on a 3D printer and lo and behold, you will be a maker all of a sudden. These technologies are going to enable this transition in a fairly seamless way.
There are a lot of folks that are DIYers, the Do-It-Yourself industry in the U.S. is a $700 billion industry led by folks like Lowes and the like, and not all the folks who go into Lowes are using that platform as a way of saving money. They redo their kitchen because they want to, not necessarily because they need to. They redo the bathroom because they want to have that project; they want to have that feeling of self-satisfaction at the end of the project. Makers work on their cars probably not as much as we use to; I think it’s because of the technology, so it’s a pretty broad definition.