How Engineering Mindsets Fuel Entrepreneurial Ventures: A Journey with Emma Fletcher

EP014_04-30-24_Emma Fletcher

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “Major retailers.” “Yeah, yeah.” “We think this is cool.” “The thing with Amazon is just, It become more and more complicated over the years.” “Yeah, maybe you can also consider to create more online resources.” will guide you through the enchanting world of toy design, marketing, and manufacturing. Now let the unboxing begin!

Jason Hsieh: Welcome back to another toy podcast episode. Today we are thrilled to dive into the fascinating world of STEM education with Emma, the mastermind behind Learn to Solder Kits. Her background is software engineering and also her mission to inspiring the next generation of innovators.

Emma’s story is just as very interesting as her award winning kits as well. Get ready for another very insightful [00:01:00] conversation on entrepreneurship, education, and power of hands on learning. Thank you for joining with me on the podcast today, Emma. 

Emma Fletcher: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

Jason Hsieh: Can you first start out sharing with our audience the inspiration behind your toy company, which is Learn to Solder Kits. How did your background in software engineering really influence your business as well? 

Emma Fletcher: Yeah, absolutely. So my background’s in engineering, that’s what I studied in college. That’s where I started my career, I was a software engineer for about 10 years before I switched into entrepreneurship and running my own business. Though I’d always been interested in entrepreneurship. And I was inspired to create, learn to solder kits from outreach I was doing in the community.

Part of the company that I worked at the time we led workshops for high schoolers to introduce them to engineering inspire them to hopefully [00:02:00] become engineers themselves, and then maybe join our company or another company in the future. I was involved in a lot of these outreach programs and one of the outreach areas that I really enjoyed doing was electronics outreach. It’s very hands on. I’ve done a little bit of electrical engineering in college as part of my engineering degree. It’s very inspiring when something lights up, right? You build it for the first time and it turns on. So I ran these workshops with some other people in the community and I wasn’t super impressed by the other kits on the market.

There are a lot of other kits and they fill different needs. But the problem I was running into is a lot of them were too complicated, right? They could take hours to complete, and for a high schooler who’s, Maybe only at the workshop because their parent told them they had to go or they’re not so sure that engineering’s for them. Being [00:03:00] given this two, three hour complicated electrical engineering project is frustrating. It often doesn’t work at the end, it’s either not finished or something goes wrong. 

 I decided to design very simple kits that only take 30 minutes to do, designed really for the workshop experience for teachers to make it easy for them to do this first project. So the child is inspired and then hopefully they want to do the three hour project, right? After that. And they have a little bit more resilience in learning and excitement about that.

Jason Hsieh: It makes sense. Actually you answered my second question already. What else that set your product really apart and how do you engage with the young learner?

Emma Fletcher: Yeah, great question. Each of the kits that we’ve designed, we have three right now that we sent. Are designed to be tactile in some way. We found that interacting with the project was very rewarding. A lot of [00:04:00] the other easy beginner kits on the market, maybe they flash an LED or something, which is cool but there’s no interactivity. 

Jason Hsieh: Do you have a kit physically with you right now? 

Emma Fletcher: I usually have one on my desk. I’ve got one in packaging right here. Like here’s how they come before you assemble them. This is our jitterbug kit and this includes a vibration motor in it. And so once it’s completed, the jitter bug vibrates on the table, so you turn it on and it moves around and you can feel it vibrate. Blink is another one of our kits, which has push buttons. So you push the buttons and it lights up. Each of our kits has this interactivity aspect that we found is just really engaging with new learners, right? They build it, then they control it, and they turn it on and they have that kind of moment of inspiration. The other thing we focused on was just really high quality parts. That’s [00:05:00] something across all of our kits is we use really high quality parts that are going to stand up to the abuse of an early learner, right?

The specific skill you learn with our kits if your listeners aren’t quite familiar with electronics is soldering, which is where you take a very hot soldering iron and you melt metal and you connect electronic components to the printed circuit board. And of course this can lead to melting parts and melting other things you know if you’re new right It’s designed for making mistakes as it’s part of the process and so all of our parts are rated for high temp, they’re Much higher quality parts than you typically find in a beginner kit. So students could be successful that first time. 

Jason Hsieh: I think like education and educating the teacher and parents seems to be a key aspect of your business model. And I’m [00:06:00] pretty sure that’s also a big part of your marketing strategy.

Can you elaborate on how you approach this and what kind of impact that you have seen with your business? 

Emma Fletcher: Definitely. We get a lot of inquiries from both parents and educators from the parent side. It’s often, I have this child who’s very interested in engineering. I’m not an engineer myself but I want to foster this, right? Their interests. What do I do? Where do I start? And it’s often a great opportunity for a parent to learn alongside a child, too. And we often encourage that this is a great project. You could learn to solder, too. You’re never too old, right? And so for parents, we encourage that. And then for educators, some of them have done maybe a little bit of programming in the classroom, a little bit of 3D printing but haven’t quite made the step to soldering, but they’re interested in it. We send free kits to any educator who wants them. They can request an [00:07:00] evaluation kit to try out for themselves before they purchase for the classroom. And that is a super popular program for us where a teacher can actually do the project if they’ve never soldered before they can learn and feel confident in their skills or if they have soldered before they can try our kit and see how it’s different from what they’ve used before. 

Jason Hsieh: Is there a typical age range that you’re trying to serve right now? 

Emma Fletcher: We aim for 12 and up. We definitely had kids younger who’ve done it but I think 12 is the age where I feel comfortable recommending it we get a lot of Late middle school, high school teachers, and then even into early college is a big thing for us. For your first intro to electronics class or trade schools often purchase our kits as well. 

Jason Hsieh: How do you navigate those different Customer segment and what kind of challenge have you faced so far?

Emma Fletcher: Our [00:08:00] sales are split almost 50 percent consumer and then 50 percent what we consider kind of educator or more corporate. And we’re a little different from other e-commerce brands in that we don’t go after the individual consumer as much, right? We don’t run Facebook ads, which I know is really popular for people. We actually don’t run any ads besides Amazon ads. So we are on Amazon and that’s our main channel for individual consumers. We do a few in person events, there’s an event called Maker Faire, which is very big for DIY projects. We’ll go there and I consider that a consumer event where people interested in DIY are there and we’ll sell. But our main marketing efforts are all towards the educators. That’s the market we really focus on because there are repeat customers. One, they buy in bulk, right? They’re buying for a classroom and then if you’re on their syllabus [00:09:00] they buy every semester. So we build really long term relationships with those educators. And that’s where we put a lot of our efforts with our free evaluation kit, outreach to educators. We donate to a lot of education and nonprofit programs as well. That marketing channel, I think is a lot longer term than like a Facebook ad, right? 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, that’s the impulse. 

Emma Fletcher: It’s definitely taken years to reap the rewards of those educator relationships, but they’re very strong relationships. Now, we’ve been in business about eight years, and we have educators we’ve worked with for, Many years now who always come back and then always recommend our kits as well 

Jason Hsieh: You mentioned about amazon, have you seen any success with the amazon business program which you can also market to the school? You know a lot of school have amazon account too.

Emma Fletcher: Yeah, we’ve done a bit with it. I Still prefer the personal [00:10:00] relationship, right? And so I focus on doing it outside the amazon platform for that reason. i’ve just found that the more of the relationship I can build and isn’t through Amazon in that case, the stronger the relationship is. And a lot of teachers have complicated buying processes, which the headache, right?

The other side that’s the headache of doing these school purchases is they all have a purchase order. Program that’s slightly different . Has the same purchase order and system. 

So we end up spending a good amount of time on, you know what? I’d say the customer support side of like making sure we have the right PDF. Signing the right things, faxing things, which is not really most businesses. 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. Outdated, some school system, the way they do business is outdated. Definitely not a 2024 way of doing business.

Emma Fletcher: Not [00:11:00] 2024 but we do our best. Like I said, these are large orders. These aren’t people looking for one kit. So the trade off for us makes sense. It might not make sense for other businesses. 

Jason Hsieh: How about specialty toy store? How are those kind of working for you? 

Emma Fletcher: Great question. That’s something new for us. We were at Toy Fest earlier this year, which is where we met actually. And that was our first kind of step into retail. We’ve had some interest. Just people reaching out to us, but not really pursued it. So we went to Toy Fest and we have found, both in specialty toy stores. And then the other group is hobby stores for us. Model airplanes, models, drones, that kind of thing. There’s actually a lot of model enthusiasts still out there, right? And they’re very interested in learning to solder to take their projects to the next level.

I think for toy stores, the good and the bad is we’re a very unique [00:12:00] product. There’s not a lot of people who sell a product like ours. We’re for an older age range, right? Which some toy stores don’t serve but then if they’re looking for an older age range toy to stock. There’s not a lot of competition in that market.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. That’s true. That’s a good way to look at it. How about science museum? Does science museum? 

Emma Fletcher: Science museums are very popular. Science museums love our kits. We’ve had some long term relationships with science museums. We are just getting into the computer history museum, so we’ll be added to their gift store soon. And so that’s been a really good fit for us too because that’s that educational technology aspect. 

Jason Hsieh: I think last time when we spoke, you also was considering international expansion as far as the brand. What factor are you currently considering when you are trying to

Emma Fletcher: Great question. Since we last spoke, we now shipped to Canada, which is very exciting. We have officially expanded on our [00:13:00] Shopify store. One of the challenges with international shipment, as I’m sure your listeners will have experienced, or if they’re thinking about it is every country is a little bit different with customs and foodies and regulation.

We ship batteries as well. Cause batteries come in the kit, which adds another level of complexity, right? And there’s actually some new compliance laws coming out in different countries around batteries, and we’re making some updates to our kit. So we’ll be compliant in Australia, the UK, because we plan to expand there as well.

Jason Hsieh: In your current packaging, does it come with English and French? 

Emma Fletcher: Not yet. Not yet, which I know is technically a requirement in part of Canada, but we decided to start shipping. We just started a couple of months ago and we’re going to go from there and add the French translation soon. 

Jason Hsieh: The reason why I also mentioned it is you want to consider to expand to [00:14:00] Amazon Canada. That’s actually the requirement. You have to have French on the packaging.

And I know you have a very unique background because you used to be a software engineer, now you’re like an entrepreneur. How has that previous role prepare you to run your own business? 

Emma Fletcher: Whenever I think about engineering, I really think about it as solving problems as a software engineer. Maybe you’re solving problems with code, right? As an electrical engineer, you’re solving problems with circuits, right? And any type of engineering is really just about problem solving. And I think business is all about problem solving too.

One, finding a problem for your consumer. What problem are they trying to solve? And then of course the logistics operations. That problem solving background, and looking at trade offs applies really well to business in a way that most people don’t expect. Sure, I don’t use code to solve my problems very often. I still write a little bit of code sometimes, but [00:15:00] now it’s more about efficiency and documentation and logistics, but all of those are, just more problems to figure out solutions to. 

Jason Hsieh: Can you share some memorable stories or moment of impact when you see, like, how the kids with the school interact with your product? Any story you want to share? 

Emma Fletcher: Every time I see a kid complete the project and it lights up for the first time is amazing. Because the project lights up and then you see their eyes light up, right? like they have this spark of this moment that it all clicks for them, that they did it right. And one of the teachers we have a long term relationship with he actually just completed 50 kits. So he’s taught 50 students to teach in his class with 50 different kits. He sent me pictures along the way of all of these students lighting up their kit for the first time. And it’s amazing to think that not all of them are going to [00:16:00] be engineers, but one day out of those 50, I feel like there’s at least one, who’s going to say I became an engineer because, I built this kit, and it was amazing, and I wanted to build more, right?

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, it’s like a little seed inside their mind. 

Emma Fletcher: Little seed, right? And I think a lot of students don’t always get exposed to the hands on side of engineering. I think it’s gotten better over the years there’s a lot more coding in schools, a lot more projects. But when I was younger, Engineering was math, right? They said, Oh, if you want to be an engineer, you better be good at calculus because otherwise it’s not for you. And math was really boring and I wasn’t very good at it. I’m going to be totally honest, right? There were cool parts, but I was not a strong academic candidate for engineering. 

I loved building things. I love taking things apart, which my mother hated, right? Like I would take apart the toaster. I would take apart all the things. I could never put them back together. [00:17:00] And then I loved building things with my hands and seeing the actual creation. That’s what led me to a career in engineering. I actually joined a robotics team. That was a very inspiring moment for me and led me on my whole career. I had these amazing teachers and mentors who fostered that and showed me that engineering could be my career, which is how I wanted to create, learn to solder kits to give back and say, here’s this kit you can teach more kids like me that engineering isn’t just math. You gotta do some math.

Jason Hsieh: It can be fun too, yeah. 

Emma Fletcher: But it can be fun and exciting and it’s not just really boring. 

Jason Hsieh: How do you adapt your product to meet the need of educator and student in a virtual learning environment?

Emma Fletcher: Great question. Actually, during COVID, we had a very prestigious college reach out and they said, We’re going virtual, right? Because of COVID. We have these 50 students in our intro to electrical engineering class. How do we do it? We gave them some tips, [00:18:00] and we actually shipped individual kits to each student for them. So they would have them for the class. And it is difficult to do a hands on project in a virtual environment, but it’s not impossible. The new kit that we just launched which we call our Deluxe Learn to Solder Kit, actually includes all the tools for the project as well.

We used to just sell the the individual kit. I was like, this is what we started with. Very small, right? The tools at home, or you purchase them separately. But now you can get all the tools as well. And that has, I’ve noticed is popular now with educators as well for their students to say, here is everything you need and you can have it at home, your own soldering iron, you can do more projects, right? Here’s your first project included. And then from here, we’re going to build on that. 

Jason Hsieh: What is your vision? Are you using a lot of AI? Because that’s the trend right now. Are you using a lot of AI in your businesses processes? And with your problem? 

Emma Fletcher: I actually don’t use any AI. [00:19:00] I feel like the engineers, the technologists are going to come for me, but I don’t use any AI currently. I’ve played around with it. There are some interesting things coming out and I’m excited to keep following it, and see what other tools come out. But honestly, a lot of the problems that we’re solving in business can just be solved with more efficient processes. And so I really focus on that more efficient processes, more quality checks, those sort of things from the human side and maybe we’ll have AI help us in the future.

Jason Hsieh: I’m a huge advocate for AI. Almost I’m actually encouraging my entire team, to take additional training on AI and try to bring us with at least one or two different use case on how they can implement AI into their daily work. 

Emma Fletcher: So what’s your best use case then? I’m just curious, right? Best AI use case.

Jason Hsieh: Best user use case is really using AI to come up with a draft of an SOP of a business process I was working on. [00:20:00] And based on that draft, of course, that’s where the human intervention do some critical thinking and see is this process that AI was suggesting actually makes sense, but it will save you a lot of time to come up with a draft that you can just go into ChatGPT and give a prompt. And this is a business process I’m trying to design, can you come up with this step, the initial step, and that really trimmed down a lot of the time for us, because right now in my business, one of the big focus is creating additional SOP, creating additional workflow. Every single aspect on the operation, marketing, sales, every single aspect of the business needs some kind of SOP. So that’s actually where I’m using it quite a bit right now. 

Emma Fletcher: I might use it soon. We’ll see. I’m still watching and waiting, but I know a lot of people are using it. 

Jason Hsieh: Wrapping up today’s interview, I know you have a very interesting background and also as an entrepreneur, if you have to just share one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started in the toy industry, how would that be?

Emma Fletcher: I [00:21:00] think my advice is always, to just launch your product, move it out the door, right? And it’s hard, like that sounds like really easy advice, people are like, oh, obviously. But actually to launch your product is very challenging, right? There’s many steps you have to figure out on the way. Because I have so many people who come to me with these great big ideas of what they want to build this whole line of products. All of these things and I’m like, okay, so how many units are you shipping right now? They’re like, Oh, we’re not shipping yet. Preparing for this launch that’s coming. And we have to do all of this work to prepare for the 10, 000 units a month where units we’re going to ship. 10, 000 units is great. And I hope you get there, but the first step is to ship one unit, right? Figure out your shipping processes, your inventory processes, all of that. 

So I think launching something small when I started. I had one single [00:22:00] kit that we sold. That was it. And I just launched it and started selling it and from there we grew. But I think it’s easy to get into kind of an analysis paralysis and never watched. The feedback you’re going to get from your customers is going to be huge, right? Once you launch that first product. So just do it, just get started. Don’t wait. It’s not perfect. It’s never going to be perfect, right? Get it out the door. 

Jason Hsieh: Thank you for that piece of advice. I’ve seen a lot of the entrepreneur tend to over complicate things, take too long. 

Emma Fletcher: Absolutely. I’m guilty of it too. I think we all have these grand visions of what we’re going to build, which is awesome. But you have to remember it all starts with that first step and even if it’s a little rough around the edges, your packaging isn’t going quite where you want it to be yet it’s still going to hopefully solve a problem for something or be engaging for someone. So launch it and see what the market says. 

Jason Hsieh: That actually lead me to one more final question. I’m curious [00:23:00] for myself. It’s because the product or the kid that you designed is so complicated. Do you actually come up with a prototype first in your own lab to make sure everything is working for you? 

Emma Fletcher: A number of prototypes. I’ll have to send you the photo of the first jitterbug prototype. Cause it’s funny looking. It’s just parts that we had around the workshop, that I put together, not a true design. But just to see the interactivity piece, cause when it comes down to our kits. That’s the most important part. Sure, the pretty board and pretty design and pretty parts are all part of it, but really the core interactivity is what we want to get right and so that’s the early prototypes that we do. Start with that. And then we build from there. We do a number of iterations, assemble them ourselves multiple times, right? To make sure the experience feels good before we launch it. 

Jason Hsieh: Where is the best place for our audience to find you? 

Emma Fletcher: The best place is definitely on Twitter or [00:24:00] X as it’s now called. You can find me @EmmaFletcher. And I’m on there. I talk about business. You can reach out to me at any time. I’m happy to answer questions. You can also send me an email, emma@learntosolderkits.com that’ll come right to my inbox and I’m happy to chat there as well. 

Jason Hsieh: Thank you again so much for being on our show and sharing your experiences and sharing your entrepreneurial journey with us and with the listener.

Emma Fletcher: Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. Great chatting. 

Jason Hsieh: You’re welcome. I’ll see you soon. 

Emma Fletcher: See ya. Bye.

Outro: You’ve been listening to Toy Business Unboxed, hosted by Jason Hsieh. Thank you for joining us and exploring the fascinating world of toys and the ingenuity behind them.

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