Sunsei Solar Power Sunshine is rising…

Well, we are finally at the start line my team and I have been looking forward to for a long time.
After months of strategizing, investigating, developing and now preparing to deliver a new brand, new products, new website and even many changes within our company… we made it. The start line to this “F1 race” was always defined by me as November 1st. We now have the best car and the best driver. Our pit crew is ready to handle the onslaught of added business and just today, we injected the gasoline into the engine required for this race. Leadership doesn’t come cheap and this exercise has demanded a lot. Yet, it is so overwhelming that the largest influx of investment ever in our history has just been secured to ensure we now deliver on the great promise and expectation we are about to create.
Imagine changing so much in so little time. No doubt it created much anxiety along the way, but I think you’ll agree that the new ICP “gets it“.
We’ll soon know if we get the consumers to whom we have been listening attentively for many months and now structured our offerings according to their lifestyle and needs, rather than simply what the technology can do.
We’ll soon know if we get the trade customers who told us that delivery, quality, distinction and margins were of tantamount importance in growing business together.
For the first time in the history of our solar cell factory, it’s at full capacity! There is no secret formula except to say that we are now targeting customers who have the highest standards for specifications. They have discovered that our gospel is matched by our product quality. The development and factory team in Wales deserves huge kudos and I am personally grateful for their continued efforts and success.
And so today (sometime during the day because not all internet service providers pick up the new site at the same time) we turn on a tap at ICP SOLAR or SUNSEI SOLAR websites, and wait to see the results. I feel like a father in a birthing room. I can’t do the mechanics, the baby is not inside me, but man can I savor the moment that baby comes out and gives new meaning to our corporate vision and future life. The change is not simply philosophical either!
We have also opened a webstore, similar to the AppleStore. While some may say that this is competing with our own customers, nothing is farther from the truth. The webstore is more like a mechanism to give us further consumer insight into our products. Imagine launching a new item, shipping it to a distributor (30 days), they then sell it to a dealer (30 days) who then sells it to a consumer (30-60days). It could therefore take up to 120 days before we’d know that our new products had an issue. We simply could not afford that. So the webstore gives us direct and immediate feedback on new products, while also helping to pay for the website investment (huge!) that we have obviously made. And while the ICP site was sending just a few hundred visitors to other sites, our retail partners get MILLIONS of visitors each month. So you can see that the effect is negligible on the retail side yet its very important on the side of complete customer service. Nevertheless, we’ll also be improving our “FIND A DEALER” section in the coming weeks as more and more pick up the new SUNSEI line. Besides, we’ll never undercut our retail-partners. Now THAT would be suicide!
To Mitch Joel and the Twist Image team, thanks! You’ve given so much to get here (and put up with a lot too!).
Sass
PS> Special thanks to Howard Firestone for the intro to Twist. Life will never be the same!