Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 4)

Drura Parrish: When you look at all of the beautiful machines that are sitting across the manufacturing floors in the United States, think about how this zooms into the broader trend here. Let’s just say, the greatest e-commerce model that we know right now is Amazon who’s trying to sell things and to get to people’s doors in under a day. But who’s going to make all the things that go to the companies? They put the things in boxes to get to Amazon to put on people’s doors.

Then you start to think about what is the free wholesale model for stuff. Is it one-to-one design, to prototype, or to scale so that any new company has direct entry into the marketplace, and every older company has the ability to nimbly move around what is already a pretty stagnant, fixed wholesale distribution model?

Sramana Mitra: How many designers are at the front end of your value chain? How many designers are on your system?

Drura Parrish: It’s over 10,000.

Sramana Mitra: How many manufacturing shops are catering to them?

Drura Parrish: We’ve built the best, biggest, and strongest network. We’re well over 2,000 in terms of manufacturing partners.

Sramana Mitra: Did they have a lot of spare capacity? What are the states right now of these manufacturing shops?

Drura Parrish: In the United States in general, the published number is about 70% capacity, and that’s in your best economy capacity utilization. Another interesting statistic is that among the top 18,000 machine shops in the United States, the top 20 account for less than 1% of the total dollars earned.

Then put that with 70% capacity utilization in the best of times. Well the rest of them below the top 20 are lucky to do 40. That’s the problem. This is what the Xometry model supports. There’s work to be had out there.

But the largest problem on one part is that we’ve been trained to wait for the larger runs. There has not been a way to aggregate enough incremental work, which is what we represent. Then the second thing is just the mindset of the machine shops.

We’re in a generational swap right now. Just by way of background, I’m a third generation manufacturer. The old ways are starting to move back and people are finally coming and seeing the value of incremental work, which pushes innovation and technology on the actual work floor. This includes getting robots to move parts on and off quickly with six axis arms to help them pack or moving from the actual machining volume over to a packing center.

So it’s a complex problem that has deep history in the way that we’ve been raised in the United States to make things. But thanks to technology and the web, finally it’s coming to a head where we can make their lives incrementally easier. We can help, on the other side, to make a more robust value chain for engineers and designers that are making the things that they need to make.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry
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