Santa Cruz Startup: New Company Name, Same Awesome Product

Lost in Translation

Santa Cruz Works recently caught up with David Conway, co-founder of SmartBins to discuss the company name change to Purcell. With a number of massive partnerships in Europe, Conway learned that a “bin” is largely identified by most Europeans as a trash can. Not an ideal representation of the their unique dispensing platform providing for food and products.

Anyone who has tried to come up with a name for a company or product knows how challenging it can be. Taking a lesson from Tesla, a company named after Nikola Tesla, Conway and team researched other respected inventors. They landed on Malcolm Purcell McLean: the inventor of the shipping container.

“Malcolm Purcell McLean was a trucker who changed shipping and the world,”

"Nearly every imported consumer good imaginable owes its lower price to Malcolm and the container revolution,” explains Conway. “His concept of containerization significantly lowered the cost of freight transportation by eliminating the repeated handling of individual pieces of cargo. In addition, the standardized intermodal container improved the reliability of shipping, reduced cargo theft and decreased the costs of inventory by cutting transport time."

Ultimately, due to McLean's invention, the cost of shipping dropped by a factor of a hundred.

Hence, let it be known that SmartBins is now and forever to be known as Purcell.

But Purcell is more than just a food delivery system. As we all know, IKEA disrupted the supply chain by popularizing flat-pack furniture Purcell. In doing that, it not only streamlined supply chains by enabling higher density shipping, but it also created an empire of lower cost store operations. Purcell is doing the same with food that is purchased daily, versus IKEA which is for product purchase every 5-10 years.

The Purcell platform also offers consumer insights for advertising and pricing optimization for the products we buy every day.

Purcell recently completed installations with Seventh Generation and SunRidge Farms. They are also working with the 9th largest private US company with hundreds of units on order. Their biggest hurdle today is keeping up with demand, especially from European retailers as they adopt sustainable shopping.

Anyone interested in getting in early as an investor should contact Purcell.