UHMWPE

My time at SRTX is ending...

Unless each man produces more than he receives, increases his output, there will be less for him and all the others.

Bernard M. Baruch

My time as President at SRTX has come to an end. I’m very excited for how they are positioned and wish them the absolute best of luck as they transition from D2C to wholesale on the back of their new capabilities and their innovative new factory.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount during my time at SRTX. I worked on problems, and took on challenges that were beyond my dreams before this. I led a team of nearly 200. I directly led 2 dozen serious, heavy weight executives, leaders, and operators. I designed, planned, and deployed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in capital. I was able to dig deep into my fascination with factories, production, automation, and standard work. Huge. A pretty big step-up from my last gig. I’m very grateful for the trust that Katherine, the board, and the team put in me - the opportunity - the experience I had - and the skills and learnings I took away.

I joined SRTX mostly by accident… My wife Katherine is the founder. She started SheerlyGenius (as it was then called) close to home in Bracebridge, and quickly outgrew it. In the summer of 2019 she bought the largest hosiery factory in Canada, and relocated the company, and herself. We were living apart, me in Muskoka, her in Montreal. She was fundraising, and needed a bit of help managing things in Montreal while travelling. I was a free agent - freshly off my earn-out at Altium, rebuilding our house, learning to race speed boats, going much deeper on cooking with fire. She asked for help, we were both a bit nervous about it, but we did it, and I headed to Montreal for what I thought would be a week or so of minding the fort. A few weeks later I was leading operations, thrown into solving our CTP nightmare, and spending my nights coding cortexos. Katherine was back, but I was having fun, we were jamming. A few months later I was COO and figuring out how to 10x production. More fun. A year or so later I was leading innovation and starting our project to make Ultra-High-Molecular-Weight-Polyethylene (UHMWPE). Exciting. Then we raised the Series-C, I was President, and my project to make UHMWPE in Canada got very, very, serious. Last summer we found our new building and kicked off construction of Canada’s only UHMWPE fiber factory, let alone a factory capable of producing 5% of the world's tights. What a massive, massive, project - the biggest of my life. Max fun.

SRTX is on a mission to replace all of the hosiery in the world with our technology. Instead of legacy materials like Nylon, Sheertex tights are made with Ultra-High-Molecular-Weight-Polyethylene. UHMWPE is a very special plastic. It was invented a long time ago, it's among the most tenacious materials humans have ever made, but outside of military soft armour, never really found its market. Until recently. Over the past decade we’re seeing all manner of textiles, medical, and recreational products being reinvented with UHMWPE. Sheertex tights are this. Katherine found a way, in the early days of the company, to knit very fine, coloured, UHMWPE into pantyhose. Pantyhose, that, because of UHMWPE, were virtually indestructible.

Tangent Alert: It’s not this story, but one of my first major missions at Sheertex was figuring out how to redesign, harden and robustify a conventional Italian hosiery knitting machine against one of the world's most tenacious materials. How do you make a machine, made of steel, which is notably weaker than the UHMWPE it knits, degrade slow enough that you can produce more than a few pairs of tights before rebuilding the machine?! Mind boggling, but some very fun engineering. We ended up building a factory operating system in order to understand and solve it. More on this someday. Back to the story…

UHMWPE is very hard to get. Especially as a fiber. Especially in fine denier. Especially coloured. And especially at a quality and consistency that allows for the manufacture of tights that make your legs look better. It's been the single biggest operational challenge at SRTX since Katherine founded the company. Getting better, cheaper and more consistent UHMWPE became my mission. Pretty quickly I realised that we would need to make it ourselves. Making this harder - UHMWPE is not something you can just buy the machines to make - it's very bespoke still - so I needed to research how to make it, and then design dozens of machines from scratch. And so started a 3 year crash course in polymers and plastics research, design, engineering and fabrication that led inexorably to the grand opening of the new SRTX factory just a few months ago.

I'm so lucky to have stumbled into this. How often do you get to learn and become effective in a new industry? Let alone one as massive as textiles. Plus polymers?! And material science! And pure automation heavy unconstrained future thinking industrialisation. Very, very lucky.

Building a factory is tricky. There isn’t really a playbook for it. Factories change a lot after you turn them on. They are fairly organic. There are a lot of people. Machines get moved around. Things break. Production targets get expanded. Most of this is unplannable. The mission becomes designing a massively decentralised, massively flexible, yet affordable and efficient, structure - inserting infrastructure, solving for distribution - inserting production lines, solving for bottlenecks - inserting people, solving for necessities - inserting material flow, minimising warehouses, solving for JIT. And that's just designing it. It needs to fit into a building that exists. It needs to flow. It needs to cost less than it should. And then a couple hundred people need to assemble it - in the middle of a construction site - with never enough time or money to get it all done. But as I write this, 3 years of design, 18 months of construction, and 8 months of commissioning later - we’ve arrived. We are finally going live.

This new factory can produce over 40 million pairs of pantyhose a year. It starts with polyethylene powder and electricity. It first makes a gel, then a plastic fiber, then a yarn, and then tights. It packages them, and ships them to D2C customers, and retailers. It requires a fraction of the labour of a conventional textiles factory. It's smart - everything sensed, measured, planned, and automated. It uses a minimal number of the most sustainable chemicals possible. It doesn't pollute (though it does use a lot of power). This all will make it possible for SRTX to produce a pair of tights, using all their wonderful technology, significantly more sustainably, for basically the same cost as a conventional pair of pantyhose. And at 40M pairs per year, they will make approximately 5% of the world's tights from this factory - which is massive!

It was very important to me as we were designing this factory that it be a model for SRTX. A platform. I want them to go on and build 10 more. Or maybe just 3 really big ones. I want them to make half the world's tights, every year, before the decade is out. To do that they needed a blueprint - a production platform - a machine - that could make half a billion tights a year. This factory is the prototype of that machine. They can now take it, replicate it, scale it, and deploy the last factory the world needs for tights.

Achieving this platform which can make all the world's tights, seeing all these innovations mature, and forcing this new factory online, also forced Katherine and I to admit that my week or so helping out was finally coming to an end. SRTX was ready for its next chapter, and so to me for mine.

And so here we are. What an opportunity. Thanks again to everyone that let me experience it. I'm grateful for all I've learned, and I’m excited about what’s next.

Foreshadowing: I so deeply loved my experience at SRTX designing and building a world class automated factory - I badly want to do that again. Factories are amazing. They are the literal source of production of humanity. Humanity would fail without factories. We can’t survive without them. But most are old, and poorly conceived. Better factories make better products. Better factories make cheaper products. What I did for tights at SRTX I want to do for more things - for necessities like houses and food.

Imagine how rich we would all be if the things we bought were both better and cheaper?!

It’s because of this that I believe that all stuff should be so cheap that it’s basically free. Things should cost roughly their energy input. Everything else is technical debt - bad design, bad factories, too much labour, not enough software, waste, machines that don't work right, not enough sensors, etc. Someday energy will be free. All that is left to fix is the tech debt of production. Designing and building better and more automated factories, with zero tech debt, is how to make the world rich.

More on this soon.