Article series on Visiting Festool HQ and Factory in Germany

[mouppe]

Terrific articles, Nicholas, I have enjoyed reading all of them.

 

[Nicholas Noe]

[member=49148]Nicholas Noe[/member] 
I was reading part 4 and the beginning of the 2nd paragraph of the article struck me immediately.

"We know who our customers are," says Steve Rangoussis, Festool USA's Chief of Sales and Marketing. Cabinet shops, installers, finish carpenters, remodelers, furniture builders, but not just any furniture builder: Heirloom furniture builders."

I thought, I'm not so sure you do know, as he never mentioned the hobbyist group. Now, I understand that Christian Oltzscher's target audience is the professional, however that's who they design/develop tools for but it is not necessarily their largest customer base.

I immediately wanted to fire off a reply to Steve, but I just kept my thoughts to myself and finished the article. However, over the last couple of days, Steve's (pompous?) statement kept playing back in my mind.

So today I tune into the FOG and this thread shows up.

http://festoolownersgroup.com/general-friendly-chat/festool-hobbyists-what-is-your-day-job-or-business/msg401580/?topicseen#msg401580

I can only hope that someone, somewhere forwards this thread to Steve so he can indeed get to know who his customers are.

[member=44099]Cheese[/member] , easy, guy, easy! To be clear, Steve was making those comments within the context of a discussion about *target* customers, i.e. the people whom they set out to design the tools for. A large part of their research comes from visiting professional shops and observing professional operations. I think we can all agree that this approach has yielded some fantastic results for those of us hobbyists (I include myself in that category, as I don't use my tools to earn a living) that have purchased Festool products. And it's far more practical than visiting the workshops of hobbyists to observe their processes; you're simply going to find the common problems faster at a high-volume shop.

As for "pompous," I gotta contest that. It's true that I don't know Rangoussis beyond interacting with him at the press events, but I can tell you what I observed at HQ between events: He's the kind of guy who starts to get himself a coffee at the coffee-dispensing machine, then notices a half-dozen people have come out of a conference room and queued up behind him, and he turns around to hand out full cup after full cup, only fixing up his own after everyone else has one.

If you worry that the hobbyist base is not appreciated, I don't think that's so; IMHO, any sales exec appreciates any customer base contributing to sales. But the context of the conversation we were having (which I hoped had been clear due to putting Steve's quote right after Christian's paragraph) was about target markets.

hope that clears things up,

- Nick

 

[Nicholas Noe]

[member=44099]Cheese[/member]

Ah, one more thing I forgot to mention (might appear in one of the articles, but since you asked): In the early days of Festool USA--around '04/'05, when the brand started to gain traction--the ballpark figures were 30% professional and 70% hobbyist. This is probably due to the fact that Festool's early U.S. distributor was Woodcraft.

The modern-day estimate, however, is 60% professional and 40% hobbyist, about 3:2. That fact coupled with the company's steady U.S. growth means that both bases have increased, but that the professional side is increasing faster. My guess is that trend will continue.

I also suspected that there were more hobbyists on the FOG than pro's, but that's probably just my perception, i.e. more to do with what topics I click on to read.

- Nick

 

[Cheese]

[member=49148]Nicholas Noe[/member]
OK, now I'm with you on this conversation.

In my own little mind I didn't correlate that the 1st paragraph & 2nd paragraphs were the same conversation. The picture between them kind of broke them into 2 separate discussions/statements.

Thanks for the input.

 

[Nicholas Noe]

Hi guys, the next one's up. This one covers the extensive testing and quality control the company does at their German facility in Neidlingen.

Part 6: Festool's Product Testing & Quality Control

I really regret that I can't show you some of the cooler things I saw, but photography inside the facility was strictly prohibited. So the photos in this one were provided by the company and are pretty limited. Suffice it to say they've got a team of people working on stuff that your average end-user might never think about. They devote a considerable amount of resources to testing and quality.

Something I found interesting and didn't write about (had to edit for length) is that what they call R&D facilities are different than what we Americans might think of. Rather than a skunkworks, Festool's R&D had a bunch of operations and rigs designed to beat the crap out of the existing tools--way beyond what I envision them undergoing even in daily use on a jobsite--to try to get them to fail so that they could fix it before it goes to market. Really cool to see.

Then again, when we walked into the facility they *did* have a blanket conspicuously thrown over something--roughly the size of four Systainers wide, maybe three deep--that we were dying to peek under, so maybe they do have a skunkworks hidden away in there. Naturally it was verboten for us to look under the blanket. With any luck we'll find out in future what was under there.

- Nick