We moved into a space in Frankford
Strommen Systems now has a workshop in Frankford, Philadelphia. It is a working space, not a storefront, and here is what it changes for buyers.
Strommen Systems has moved into its own space, in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia.
To be clear about what this is: it is a workshop. It is where we test, repair, photograph, and stage equipment. It is not a storefront and it is not open to the public. There is nothing to visit and nothing to browse. Everything we sell is sold online.
I am saying that plainly because “we got a space” tends to be read as “we opened a shop,” and that is not what happened.
Why it was necessary
The constraint on this business has never been finding stock. There is always more stock. The constraint is bench time.
A home bench handles one lot at a time. That is fine when you are buying one lot at a time. It stops working the moment you win a pallet, because a pallet is not a thing you test sequentially in a spare room. It is a thing that needs floor space, shelving, power, and somewhere to put the units that have passed while you work on the ones that have not.
Without that, everything queues behind everything else. Listings go up weeks after the lot arrives. Capital sits in boxes. The whole operation runs at the speed of the slowest step, and the slowest step is having nowhere to put anything down.
What it changes
Throughput. More units under test at once means listings go up in days rather than weeks. That is the entire point.
Bigger and stranger lots. The best value in surplus is frequently in the lots that are inconvenient, because inconvenience thins the bidding pool. Full racks. Pallets of machines. Lab instruments that weigh more than a person and need to be crated properly. We can take those now, and we intend to.
Better lab work. Instruments like the atomic force microscope we have been writing about need space, stable power, and somewhere they can sit undisturbed while being worked on. That was never going to happen in a spare room.
Proper packing. Heavy and fragile equipment needs to be crated and foamed properly. That requires materials and room to work, and it is the difference between a piece of lab equipment arriving intact and arriving as an insurance claim.
What does not change
The standard. Every unit still gets powered on, tested under load, and photographed as it ships. Anything that does not pass gets parted out rather than listed with an asterisk.
A bigger space is only worth having if the standard holds. The standard is the entire reason anyone buys from a small operation rather than a large one, and we are not going to trade it for volume.
What is next
We are working through the backlog first. Expect the shop to fill out over the coming weeks, with more networking gear and considerably more lab equipment than we have carried before.
If you are looking for something specific, tell us. We bid every week, and it is much easier to buy well against a known buyer than to guess.