Excerpt from Utah Business magazine, April 2023|Traeger Grills, a multi-million-dollar, Salt Lake City-based wood pellet grill company, is currently in 30 countries under the leadership of Jeremy Andrus, a veteran of global deals. Andrus’ former consumer electronics brand, Skullcandy, was sold in 80 countries around the world.
“How you source, where you source and how you build a brand internationally—they’re very different capabilities,” Andrus says.
It was sourcing complexities at Traeger that pushed Andrus to get involved with WTC Utah. For the last 20 years, China was the only place to source consumer durables, providing a lot of infrastructure and low labor costs—and Traeger relied on it, according to Andrus. But the pandemic changed all that, bringing difficult supply chain issues. Traeger needed to access raw materials, components and chipsets from China for its connected grill that uses an IoT microprocessor. These were suddenly in short supply and suffered a huge jump in shipping costs, Andrus says.
“There was a moment about a year ago where the cost to transport from China to the U.S. went up literally by 10 times over a six-month period,” Andrus says.
“It was really scary and frustrating. We just needed to not be 100 percent beholden to shipping products from China.”
With the help of WTC Utah, Traeger set up new manufacturing and supply chains in Vietnam and Mexico. Andrus says he found it invaluable to rely on WTC Utah’s expertise in guiding him through the pitfalls before and during this transition.
“Although I had been sourcing for 17 years in China, I knew very little about Vietnam and Mexico,” Andrus says. “When you’re a small business, you have limited resources to understand these things. You only know what you know, and there’s probably a lot that you’re going to learn in the process, some of which may be risky to your business. To be able to sit with WTC Utah and say, ‘Can you connect me with a half dozen Utah companies that have moved manufacturing to Vietnam so I can interview them and learn from their experiences?’ It’s this knowledge base from companies and WTC Utah that’s so valuable.”
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