Author Archive

It’s all about our customers…

Over the past few months, GCS’ focus has been all about distribution. We’ve figured out how to penetrate the villages with our vehicle and village meetings, but we realized…GCS needs an offseason product! With all our village visits, there seemed to be such a need an interest in phone charging and lighting at night. So…

GCS decided to add one more product to its product line, the SunKing Pro Solar   Light and Phone Charger. 

The lamp is not a product of GCS, but actually a product of Greenlight Planet, another US-founded social enterprise. Why this new non-bicycle-related product?!?

Basically, it’s a great product with a one-year warranty, provides phone charging and lighting in the village with no added infrastructure, and it meets a huge need with great potential as a service product! Just as people could rent out our maize shelling bicycles, people can now rent out these lights. Or on the flip side, just like our maize sheller machine creates micro-entrepreneurship, so do these lights, creating rural employment and empowering entrepreneurs to help themselves climb out of poverty while making an impact in their community.

In setting up the distribution of these lights, when the maize season comes around, we’ll be ready with a massive network!  As for how things are moving, over the past 5 days, we’ve sold 21 lights. Not a bad start…I’ll keep you posted! And stay on the lookout for an upcoming blog post from our very own Reuben!

We have some major changes coming up this holiday season to kick us off into an exciting year ahead.

Jodie | Arusha

The GCS Kiwia Charger at the Smithsonian!

The Smithsonian Exhibition, Design for the Other 90%: CITIES, opens today!   Check it out!

1400 machines…delivered!

Loading the truck in Dar! Offloading the truck in Arusha! Another successful import, and finally, we’re ready to reach new markets!

The Morogoro Phenomenon

Today, one of the most fascinating things happened. I expected the meeting to be a bust. The Municipal Officer did not show up for the meeting, we couldn’t figure out where the meeting was, the assistant to the Municipal Officer didn’t show for quite a while.

The crowd seemed, restless bored, and then suddenly, they all woke up. It was fascinating to see. I was observing Maggie closely, to see how she went along, thinking all along, “she forgot to go through all the things we reviewed yesterday…How come she’s already talking about the price?” But then the weirdest thing happened, people just started buying our products. Money went up in the air, and suddenly, it was no longer an introduction of the product, but we were selling!

And then before we knew it, our stock was gone.

In essence, it was a record meeting for us. We sold $80 worth of goods in 15 minutes (excluding the 1 hour of prep to get the bicycle over there and find maize, the 1.5 hours waiting for the meeting to start, and the 1 hour to get through the agenda). It felt refreshing, as that was the typical amount sold per rep in a week… In 15 minutes, we had done it…

I guess the best way to summarize the day for us is that it was the first time to have a breakeven day selling only to enduser customers.

The agriculture office was the place to be.

As for other crazy observations, there was a certain energy about today. As I was walking back from my meeting, everywhere I went, I found that everyone was talking about our work…passed by the…

• police station: See that machine that girl is delivering? It’s a maize shelling machine.
• guy on the street: GCS! (he stopped me in tracks, as I was like…how does he know that? apparently he remembered me quite well from Nane Nane)
• cafe: Oh, that girl is working with the phone charger using the bicycle
• motorcycle driver: Hey, how are you doing? I went on with my normal greetings (trying to politely get away since people are always interested in talking to strangers), and then he said “do you have any chargers?”

Word of mouth in Tanzania…it’s definitely an amazing thing!  I hope we can leverage this tool as we head deep into the field.

Jodie | Morogoro, Tanzania