“I will give you money this time because I want you to go to the hospital for your baby,” he said, digging into his pocket for a ten-cedi note. “But I am traveling to America next week, and I can’t take care of you. You need to find a way to get by.” It was the only time in Africa that I saw Whit break his own rule about handing out money to people who weren’t obviously handicapped. Outside, Victor was slinking out the gate with his girlfriend, who wore tight jeans and a big hairdo. Whit watched and shook his head: “What an asshole.”
1. Try China
There is a place in the world for the corkscrew that breaks after one use, the faucet that leaks out of the box, the gas oven that blows out when you shut the door, the refrigerator that won’t stay closed, the garlic press that bends into a pretzel, and the tongs that lacerate your hand like scissors. That place is the African kitchen. I illustrate my point with these common household appliances because of my intimate familiarity with them, but you could as easily find examples in office supplies or mechanic’s tools or consumer electronics. Any product that is too shoddy or unsafe for the West ends up getting sold in Africa, alongside the cast-off Goodwill clothing and the refurbished four-track cassette decks.
The main engine today is China, scouring Africa for natural resources with which to power its manufacturing colossus, and repatriating the continent’s raw materials in the form of shiny junk for which there is no warranty, no return, and no exchange. Against this tsunami of stamped tin and thin plastic paddled my brother, trying to bring well-made but affordable products to rural Ghanaians. “They deserve better,” he would say, and he meant it—but by the summer of 2010 it had become clear that his business was unlikely to thrive on batteries alone.
Indeed, with battery quality issues seemingly under control, a nagging question remained: why were so many people in Burro’s villages still using Tiger Heads? It seemed that even the best Burro resellers had a hard time keeping customers coming back for more exchanges. Since the first battery use was essentially free—you could return the dead battery and get your deposit back, having paid nothing—ongoing exchanges were crucial to the business; otherwise it was just a free-trial giveaway. But instead of exchanging old for new every week or so, many customers were giving up, returning their dead batteries, and collecting their deposit.
Presumably those customers were going back to buying Tiger Heads, as the only other option was living in darkness after six o’clock every night. Whit knew his batteries were better than Tiger Heads and cost less money; the Burro team was working to ensure that every battery sent out had been properly charged and tested for strength. What was not to like? It took months of work on the ground for Whit to fully understand that the problem lay in the nature of the local battery-powered devices, and in the peculiarly subjective nature of human vision.
Whit knew from all his testing that Burro’s NiMH batteries provided bright light for about thirty more hours than the cheap carbon-zinc Tiger Heads. The problem was that the Tiger Heads continued to provide at least some light for several more days, whereas the Burro battery quickly died at the end of its useful life. In the modern world of smart, high-tech devices and ready power supplies, the Burro power curve would be preferable; you’d get a lot of steady power, followed by a steep drop-off that signaled it was time to recharge. But rural Ghana was not the modern world. Whit’s customers didn’t have smart devices, much less electricity to recharge their batteries. Instead, virtually all of Burro’s clients used “dumb” flashlights sold (also by Tiger Head) for two or three cedis—lights that by their very simplicity were ideally suited for the long, slow voltage trickle of Tiger Head batteries. “They’re killing us with these cheap LED flashlights,” said Whit. “They have no serious circuitry, so instead of keeping power constant as the battery voltage falls, they actually draw less current—a lot less. It would be like if you were climbing a mountain and the more tired you got, the more weights people along the trail would remove from your pack. You could keep going forever. So as Tiger Heads die, their voltage just tracks lower and lower in a straight line. And those cheap flashlights respond to the lower voltage by demanding less and less power.”
“So what’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Well, the light gets dimmer and dimmer. Think of brightness as being the weights in that backpack. The more you take out the easier it is to climb, but the less light you have. Laws of physics apply here.”
Indeed, Whit’s tests demonstrated that the light provided by a dying Tiger Head was barely visible, perhaps on the level of a dim night-light. But here was the problem: the human eye does not readily perceive differences in light intensity; it simply adjusts and gets on with things. Only when compared head-to-head with a more powerful light do we say, “Aha! Big difference!” As far as the average Ghanaian villager who owns only one flashlight was concerned, that faint glow was still light. Explaining to her, “Well yes, but, you see, it’s not really very much light, and Burro gives you much better light for a lot longer, at least at first,” presented a qualitative marketing challenge, to say the least.
In short, Whit was trying to sell “brighter” to people who really wanted “long-lasting.” And while he couldn’t change the physics of the NiMH battery curve, he felt there had to be some way to work around their disadvantage in cheap devices. After all, the batteries were inherently better.
Then one night in the battery room, it hit him.
“Hey Max, check this out,” he said. “I’m thinking you could run one of these flashlights on just one Burro battery.” He had fashioned a sort of faux battery with a roofing nail and a ball of tinfoil, which he was jamming into a flashlight canister.
“One battery in a two-battery flashlight?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be incredibly dim?”
“Well yeah, it would be running at 1.2 volts instead of 2.4. But it would still be brighter than people are used to on their rundown Tiger Heads. In fact, I’m thinking the power required to operate at that lower voltage would be so low that …” He paused.
“That what?”
“I’m almost afraid to say this. But I’m thinking the flashlight might actually run longer on one battery than on two.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Maybe so, but I think I’m right. It would be incredibly cheap, much cheaper than two Tiger Heads. It would make Burro the cheapest way to get fresh light today, and as we’ve seen, with most of our customers it’s all about current expenditure.”
We stared at each other and smiled. It was like the moment in The Producers when accountant Leo Bloom realizes they can make more money creating a Broadway flop than a hit. But while Bialystock and Bloom never imagined their flop would become a hit, Whit realized from the beginning that his battery saver would be a crowd pleaser.
“This is huge,” said Whit. “Shit, though. It means bringing in a device that diminishes the need for my product; that’s a little scary, but we’re losing these people anyway.”
“And couldn’t people just use the eliminator with a Tiger Head?” I asked. “Then you’re back in the same hole.”
“Well, you could design it with an insert on the top that wouldn’t work with Tiger Heads,” he said, “although people could probably game it with a piece of tinfoil. But a single Tiger Head in one of these flashlights would get really dim really fast, and it’d be especially prone to leaking. I’m pretty confident that most users would pick Burro in a head-to-head running this way.”
Whit shoved a single battery into the flashlight with the makeshift tinfoil “battery eliminator” as he quickly dubbed it (later christened the battery saver) and turned it on. “I need to test this.”
The other way around the cheap flashlight issue was to sell better lights and other smart devices optimized for Burro’s NiMH batteries. One example was the jerry-rigged battery-powered phone charger that Whit was already selling for three cedis, but he wanted a Burro-branded phone charger, ideally with a built-in flashlight, that wouldn’t force cust
omers to cut and splice wires from their wall charger.
Through Three-Sixty, his China-based sourcing partner from his Cranium days, Whit had located a low-cost consumer electronics manufacturer in Guangzhou that was ready to work with him. During a visit to their plant in the summer of 2009, Whit was shown a standard catalog of flashlights, most of which were too expensive or included useless frills like flashing disco lights. He told them he wanted a simple but elegant four-battery phone charger that incorporated an LED light, including a red light for preserving night vision while hunting. He was also interested in selling a Burro-branded headlamp, but it would have to cost a lot less than the forty-dollar versions Americans buy from L.L. Bean, and even less than the twenty-dollar versions sold at Walmart. Whit laid down a few thousand dollars to commission hand samples—prototypes that must be approved before actual production begins—for the combination phone charger and flashlight and the headlamp. It went downhill from there.
Whit had specified that the phone charger include circuitry to shut itself off when the power from the batteries dropped below 3.6 volts. That was crucial to prevent damaging Burro’s expensive NiMH batteries, which lose capacity if they are run down too low. Bernice, the manufacturer’s English-speaking sales rep, confirmed by email that the company could make the unit as described for a wholesale price of $1.32 “FOB China,” which means free-on-board China—the cost before shipping and customs. After factoring in those additional expenses, each unit would probably cost Whit about two dollars, or three Ghana cedis. He figured he could sell it for five cedis, which represented a modest but acceptable gross profit margin. (Net profit would of course be much less after factoring in the cost of his operations.)
Everything was falling into place. But when the hand samples for the charger and the headlamp arrived in Ghana in October 2009, it was clear that a lot had been lost in translation. Whit detailed the problems in a follow-up email to Bernice:
PHONE CHARGER:
The battery compartment requires a screwdriver to open. This is not acceptable. Our clients do not have access to screwdrivers. The compartment must snap closed securely and cannot require a screw for closure.
The battery contacts do not work well yet. I had to use a piece of tinfoil to get the negative contacts on the lid to contact the battery terminals. Please be certain you are testing with high-capacity, NiMH AA cells that are custom labeled as these tend to have slightly different dimensions, smaller electrode contacts, and larger diameters. Such batteries fit a bit too snugly into the unit currently and do not make electrical contact. This is a major concern.
The lights should stay on when the button is pressed and turn off when the button is pressed a second time. Our clients will be using the lights for extended periods. It is not acceptable to have to hold down the button to keep the light illuminated.
The green is not our Burro green. Please confirm that you will able to hit PMS 802 C 2X in the final plastic.
HEADLAMP:
The switch on our sample unit is defective. It is nearly impossible to turn the unit off once it is on. It takes many attempts before the mechanism finally clicks in correctly and turns off the unit. This is very troubling since I don’t know how we could count on the quality of production units if the one sample is so flawed.
The clicking angle adjustment seems quite prone to breaking. I’m concerned that the plastic part that provides the ratchet might easily snap after repeated use. I’d like to know more about your testing on this and any return issues or complaints you might have had. At a minimum, we would need to have spare parts of the piece with the ratchet so that we could field service any that might break in the service of Burro clients.
Whit concluded by pointing out that the phone charger did not cut off below 3.6 volts, as specified, and did not seem to work with many phones, including his own.
“We can’t reach this,” Bernice responded in an email, referring to the 3.6-volt cutoff requirement. “It needs professional IC* which is used for rechargeable Lithium battery. The extra charge is USD 1.5-2/PCS.”
That would more than double the cost of the unit, evaporating Whit’s profit.
She went on, “We have sold this item to Europe and USA 5 years ago. Why Africa has more strict standard?”
As for the headlamp, she wrote: “The price deserves the present quality. We can’t match low price products with higher quality products…. I think it’s suitable for African market also.”
In other words, Bernice was proposing to send my brother the same old junk that Africa always gets. Whit was insulted, and furious that she had been wasting his time. He wrote back:
Wow! I’ll be honest with you. Your responses to my email providing feedback on the samples were extraordinarily disturbing. Note that on 24 August I specified precisely the functional requirements to control maximum output voltage, to cut off current flow at 3.6 volts, and to ensure current could not flow back into the batteries. Based on this exchange, I agreed to proceed with the design and arranged to wire transfer the design, tooling, and sample fees early in the following week. Now, weeks into the process and thousands of dollars later, I learn that to achieve what was specified from the beginning and agreed upon will require additional circuitry that would more than double the unit price I had been quoted. Frankly, your comments about Africa add insult to this injury. My business is all about introducing more appropriate products into this market, Bernice. While I welcome your product insights, please do not presume to dismiss critical market requirements we have garnered on the ground here while building a new kind of brand and business. Your suggestion that cheap is the right answer for our market is, frankly, insulting—especially after having agreed to deliver the functionality we need at a price we had agreed upon.
Perhaps most disturbing to me was your comment about the headlamp, “The price deserves the present quality. We can’t match low price products with higher quality products.” Bernice, perhaps I wasn’t clear. The headlamp does not work. The switch is broken.
More generally, let me reply specifically to your comment and question about the charger, “We have sold this item to Europe and USA 5 years ago. Why Africa has more strict standard?” Call me crazy, Bernice, but if I buy a phone charger, I expect it to charge my phone. Your sample does not charge my phone, it fails to charge other phones we tested on the first day, and its present circuit limitations will hasten the destruction of our valuable battery inventory. Why should Africans care more than Americans or Europeans that something they buy actually does what they bought it for? That answer is simple, Bernice. Because they have so much less.
I think we are done here.
Whit was done with trying to extract Burro-worthy product from this particular factory, but he viewed the whole snafu as a delay, not a defeat. As long as he was going back to the drawing board, he decided to keep it simple and make the phone charger a stand-alone product with no light—basically a square plastic battery holder similar to the generic ones I had schlepped over in the spring of 2010, only Burro-branded and with a removable adapter tip to match any kind of phone connection. That would be easy to source through Three-Sixty. As for a lantern, he was brainstorming bigger ideas—and he already had a new design and manufacturing partner in mind: a young American engineer living in China who shared Whit’s passion for bringing quality products to the world’s lowest income families.
2. The Green Book
I came home from Ghana in June of 2010 and spent my first summer with my family in Maine in two years. As soon as the leaves started falling in October, I was back on a plane to Accra. Whit had arrived the night before, from a two-week Italian vacation with Shelly. My own absences from home were difficult for Sarah, but they paled in comparison to Whit’s: he was spending most of his time in Ghana, with only brief visits home. The long separations were straining his marriage. The original plan was for Shelly to join Whit in Ghana after a year or so, once both kids were away at college; maybe they would rent Charlie’s house
in Peduase, about halfway between Accra and Koforidua. But then she got her big job at the Gates Foundation, and that became impossible. Shelly was totally self-sufficient, adept at running their Seattle household and holding down a demanding job that could find her flying to India for two days. But with both their kids out of the nest, Shelly, like Whit, was living in an empty house—one even bigger than Whit’s African bachelor pad. “It’s pretty stressful all around,” said Whit as we drove off from the airport and into the boil of Accra. “I mean, we had a great time in Italy. We still really love each other, enjoy each other’s company, share the same values. We talk on the phone every few days, and I try to stay engaged in her life and with the kids. But it’s hard.”
Whit’s vacation was compromised by a tenacious intestinal disorder that was eventually diagnosed as giardia, a type of flagellate, pervasive in Ghana, spread through fecal-contaminated drinking water. Antibiotics can kill the flagellates themselves but not the reproductive cysts, so it can take several courses to wipe out subsequent generations. As a result, despite a vigorous round of antibiotics before Whit left for Italy, the little bastards were still hanging on when he came back. The situation wasn’t helped by an almost comically grim layover in Libya on Afriqiyah Airways, which was, until the Arab revolutions of early 2011 and the NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Tripoli, Muammar el-Qaddafi’s showcase commercial airline.
Afriqiyah didn’t fly to the Western Hemisphere, but its colorful Airbus jets (one of which crashed in May 2010, killing 103 people) crisscrossed Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The late-model planes were reported to be exceedingly comfortable, with ample legroom and leather seats—green, to match the Libyan flag—even if there was no alcohol served. But Afriqiyah’s real draw was its rock-bottom fares. Perhaps realizing few Westerners would make it a first choice, the airline had managed to lure travelers with fares roughly half that of its competitors. Always anxious to save money that could be better spent on his self-financed business adventure, Whit decided to give Afriqiyah a go, connecting through Tripoli to Rome. It was, to put it mildly, a learning experience.
Max Alexander Page 35
