Manufacturing Band.it

Manufacturing a custom product at scale isn’t a simple task. Because there are over 500 unique lenses that the band.it can fit on, many of them being different sizes and shapes, the manufacturing team and industrial engineers that designed the process needed to be creative. Using fourth generation manufacturing techniques, such as network communication between machines and automated order processing, we were able to reduce the manual labor required so that we could customize the band.it to each lens at scale.

In our office space in Gainesville, there is 36 square feet dedicated to the production and processing of band.its. The network of machines recognizes when an order is made on our online store, and the order information is passed onto the machines that handle order processing. When the inventory levels on the processing side get low, an intelligent signal is sent upstream so that another batch is produced just in time for production to begin.

To create this process, we assembled a team of students from the University of Florida who majored in mechanical engineering, computer science, and industrial engineering. Together, they were able to minimize in-house processing time and waste and as a result, the future of band.it manufacturing is modular and scalable.

Band.it Colors

Henry Ford once said any customer can have a car painted any color that they want so long as it is black. For the first two years, the band.it team believed in this motto, and the product was only available in black. Eventually, we received many customer requests to introduce colors so that they can identify their different lenses on the job. The team took note of this feedback and in a span of four months introduced nine more colors to the lineup. Now, the Band.it comes in Black, Gray, White, Purple, Orange, Blue, Yellow, Red, Pink, and Green.

The Future of Band.it

Moving into 2020 we are expanding the operation to process ~180 units per day and reduce the required space to 18sq/ft with a focus on automation and the implementation of an injection molding process the RDM team has been developing called PIIM. 

The future of band.it manufacturing is bright. With a long-term manufacturing contract secured with RDM, the band.it team expects that its future demand from customers will continually be met with some design changes to the current process. Additionally, the company expects to announce new partnerships in the first quarter of 2020 that will drastically change production volume. Because of this, there may be several key pivots that band.it’s manufacturing may need to take, but the team is always ready for the challenge and are excited to bring more innovation to the manufacturing of band.it!