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 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

• Bernard goes to the US for the GO Campaign! And receives the 2011 Go Innovation Award!
• Daniel and Jodie go to the Segal Family Foundation retreat in Uganda!
• Board Member Gwyndaf Jones visits GCS in Arusha!
• GCS hires a fifth sales rep for Morogoro…Magreth Luwanda!
• Jodie is named a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow!  And attends the TEDGlobal Conference in Edinburgh!
• Diane Hendrix from Young World Inventors comes to visit GCS in Tanzania!  Help fund her efforts!
• Bob Compton comes to visit GCS for a special project coming out next year!
• GCS exhibits at Nane Nane!  Pictures to come soon.
• GCS revs up for travel into the field!  Pictures to come soon.

As for the daily operations, I apologize to all of you for a lack of updates.  I have been in the field, working with our reps, coaching them to become better salesmen.  I’ve been coming home, covered in dust from the day’s work.

In essence, we’re busier than ever, and there’s lots of exciting things coming, including the import of our latest generation of products.  Stay on the lookout for photos to come soon from Nane Nane and pictures of our newly branded GCS vehicle!

Happy Nane Nane (8/8: Tanzania’s Farmer’s Day)!

Jodie | Arusha, TZ

I landed in Hong Kong on the first of May, where I then met with Shawn Frayne of Haddock Invention. Both of us MIT alumni and students of Amy Smith of MIT’s D-Lab, or International Development Program, this was a great opportunity for us to share the challenges of working in our sector as well as hear about where things are going for the both of us. Shawn is indeed doing amazing things such as B-squares with Jordan McRae and his new Coho Solar Project, and I urge you all to check his work out!

Shawn gave me tips to getting around China, and he shared me how he finds OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), and I was soon introduced to how to use Alibaba to find manufacturers and then screen them. You discover that some people are running hole-in-the-wall places, but it’s a good starting point as you’re bound to get 1 hit despite the dozens of options.

I then went to Taiwan, where I met with a few Taiwanese businessmen who source Chinese products for American companies. I learned that for every manufacturer they work with, it’s a building of a relationship and a fairly intense screening process…6 months long! But, the peak of my Taiwan excursion was when I went to the Taipei Exhibition Center, and I was able to get some “priceless” items, which included the Taiwan Bicycle Source, which includes the contacts of hundreds of bicycle and bicycle part factories throughout Taiwan and China…and these were just the Taiwanese companies!

From there, my trip was all about China. I went to the China Cycle International Show in Shanghai to see the latest designs in bicycles. It was amazing to see the new generation of electric bicycles as well as some “bike” designs of the future, like with the DreamSlide.

The following day, I left on a 8-hour train to Dezhou, where I then visited our casting manufacturers to meet the president of the factory and then to QC the products. It was indeed an experience to remember! I have attached a bit of video to educate you about the process of casting and how GCS is ensuring quality.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbM8AVwfqY0]
My trip ended in Shenzhen, the fastest growing city in China (its population grew over 50-fold in the past 25 years!) and home of nearly all the electronics you could ever dream of. There, my life changed in realizing the vast opportunity of business in China. I purchased a few sample products, and we’ll see how the market responds. I’m determined to go back some time in the far future to gain fluency in Mandarin.

Jodie | Shenzhen, China

Just to let you know the mechanical sheller works like a charm in Moldova. As u mentioned every bicycle is different so we had a little work attaching her to the bike, but that was expected. With some original Moldavian improvisation we managed to make a ‘testing’ set-up and she worked perfectly, although the corn spatted everywhere and made a big mess. But they already had ideas to catch the corn that was spitted out in another configuration and they will do that themselves…And also they are now very proud they have the only cornsheller in the village that came all the way from Tanzania

We are definitely working to put the Global in Global Cycle Solutions.

Daniel | Arusha