I guess I have a couple of questions here that are sort of connected.
What made you decide to start making yoyos and what made you want to open up your own machine shop as opposed to just sending your designs to a third party producer?
What was your original vision for One Drop when you were starting out, and has that vision changed at all since then? If so, what is your vision for One Drop moving forward?
Originally we were just a machine knowing that the right idea would come and that happened to be yoyos. The plan from the beginning was to have our own shop. Having someone else make our products is never in the plan. Us making our own product is fundamental to this whole endeavor. It’s the point of it.
Our vision from the beginning was to make cool stuff. And that will drive us all the way.
Was there an interest in yoyos in the beginning, or did you just open the machine shop and yoyos happened after that?
I had an interest as a child. In 2002 I saw my first machined metal ball bearing yoyo at a kite shop on the coast. Thought it was super cool and proposed to Shawn we make them. We decided against it because we had one machine at the time which was a Mill (a lathe is the proper type of machine to make round things). Then it just so happens a college student asked us to make him one yoyo in 2007 as a mentorship. We did that and then decided to sell them and it worked!
That’s really cool! So what brought about the machine shop?
Shawn worked as a machinist his whole life. Early on in our friendship we thought it would be a great idea to have a business together.