PCH to help get products to market faster

Irish supply chain solutions company PCH International will open an engineering and product development facility in San Francisco in October. It will help start-ups and large corporations to develop services in design and manufacturing, sustainable packaging and transportation.

"This is the early part of product development . . . and it's going to be the greatest enabler of hardware on the planet," said Liam Casey, the founder and chief executive of PCH International. The Cork-headquartered PCH has operations in the US and in Shenzhen, southern China.

PCH designs, builds and ships consumer electronics devices and accessories on behalf of some of the world’s largest brands.

The new innovation centre will act as a gateway between Silicon Valley and the company’s manufacturing operations in China.

The new innovation centre will be in a 30,000sq ft building in San Francisco, in a warehouse that once housed the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

It will be home to Lime Lab, the Silicon Valley-based consultancy that PCH bought last year to help boost its in-house product development and engineering services. Lime Lab offers hardware start-ups and companies a full-service consultancy to help their products move from idea to packaged product within a few months.

PCH already operates an Accelerator programme, which aims to provide product development and supply chain management services to smaller companies, which Casey said was aimed at building “the Fortune 500 companies of the future”.

“We have six companies already in the Accelerator programme,” he said. “Lime Labs is part of a platform and we will put the Accelerator companies on top of that platform,” said Casey.

PCH’s retail distribution platform, TNS Distribution in Dublin, “will be the channel on the right-hand side of the curve that brings the product to market,” said Casey.

PCH is hiring 15 more engineers by October and hopes to have 80 people by next year.

Lime Lab was co-founded by Kurt Dammerman and Andre Yousefi in 2009 and the group concentrates on prototypes, working with industrial design firms to develop products from concept through to manufacturing support.

“Our in-house product development and engineering teams differentiate us from traditional supply chain management service providers,” he said.

“We architect the most up-to-date sustainable supply chain solutions for many of the world’s top brands, and we believe we enable them to bring products to market in a shorter time frame,” said Casey.

He said that by offering product development together with sustainable supply chain management solutions, PCH’s product designers and engineers plan for “manufacturability” from the outset, enabling a faster time-to-market and peace of mind for the company’s clients.