Hey! So we have all heard the story, a college student walks into a machine shop and requests a yoyo to be machined, and later this machine shop would go on to be come One Drop. My question is, how different is running a machine shop compared to running a yoyo company? Many don’t seem to realize running a yoyo company is more than just creating a product, so I feel like it’d be great to hear from the experts!
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I think that running any business has similar aspects and challenges. When we were a machine shop, we still needed to find customers and do work for people.
Our experience of running a yoyo company is different from most others because we make them yoyos in house. Keeping a machine shop up and running is quite difficult and costly. We have a lot of over head and maintenance to do. We have to worry about insurance, paying for our building, taking care of employee(s). In terms of selling a product, you need to be able to design, build and do production. Come up with packaging, a story and a way to sell it. Then you need to be able to support it as well.
Currently One Drop is three people: myself and Shawn are the owners and we have one employee Andrew. While there is overlap in what we do, the basic break down is:
Shawn: runs the machine shop, is the key yoyo designer. Making yoyos can’t happen without Shawn. Others can assist in the design, but Shawn is the key here.
Me: I run the business side of things. Accounting, sales, taxes, customer service. I also do most of the yoyo assembly.
Andrew: most of his time is spent operating machines. He also does assembly when needed.
We are probably a smaller operation that most would guess.
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Wow just three people? Amazing.
I’ve often said, and this is an especially amazing thing to say about a 3 person shop, “There is no such thing as a bad One Drop yo-yo”. The quality and craftsmanship is so high in every single release… and I have a lot of One Drop yo-yos! Kudos.
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Thank you for the kind words and for having a lot of One Drops 
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