Formed in London following a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign, Swytch develops and sells conversion kits that turn conventional bicycles into electric bikes. The start-up claims it can convert 99% of bikes by providing a replacement wheel, powerpack and pedal sensor.
“If you have an e-bike, you are five times more likely to ride it than a regular bike,” says Charlie Newton, head of manufacturing and logistics. “And, if you can change your commute from using a car, we found that people can save an average of 200kg of CO2 per year.
“We like to think of ourselves as a more sustainable option than a complete e-bike as well, because you don’t have to manufacture an entire bike – you can simply adapt and ‘upcycle’ your existing bike.”
Charlie Newton
Gearing up
“We’re still a small engineering team but we’re expanding rapidly, so our team has to have a generalist skillset. Sometimes you don’t have all of the skills required for a new set of problems, so we provide training and support.
“We also have fast iteration loops and work in an agile style – as soon as we identify an improvement to quality, process, design or cost, we try to implement it quickly, with minimal barriers.
“We have several teams within engineering – the R&D team, the manufacturing and quality team in the UK, and the quality team in China. For the manufacturing and quality teams, our day normally starts early with calls to our team in China, as well as our factory managers and suppliers, to ensure products are being manufactured on time and to our high quality standards.
“Then at 10am our whole company has a video-call ‘stand up’ where we share any operational updates, announce socials and company notices. The rest of the morning is spent progressing hardware, software and data projects. We design the test equipment used throughout our supply chain, and are always making improvements to our quality processes.
“If we have any test rides to do on drivetrain hardware, we’ll take some of the office bikes out for a spin after lunch to the Olympic Park, which is just round the corner. This could be for looking into potential issues, testing new software, or just welcoming new team members.
“In the afternoon there are design review meetings, and my department provides updates on when containers are arriving and when software updates will be deployed to our internal software tools. We also do bench-top testing and results analysis on production samples, which could be small components from new suppliers, or our complete e-bike conversion kits.”
Powered pedals
“We work closely with the customer service team on quality, working to fix any issues a customer may have with their kit. It’s down to our team to investigate the root cause of problems, and we also let them know when any fixes are being deployed, or replacements being sent. Sometimes we implement further quality processes in our factory, which means talking to our team in China and to our suppliers.
“Manufacturing at scale is really hard, as Elon Musk regularly says on Twitter. We spend a lot of time working with suppliers to resolve production issues before they ever make it into our products, and working out how we can increase production capacity for the coming months.
“We’re working on ways to compress lead times by using data modelling to forecast kits before we sell them. We have also done work on risk mitigation to reduce the probability of issues going undetected in the supply chain, as safety and user experience is top priority.
“We’re actively hiring for several roles over the next few months. Working in a hardware start-up has been an amazing experience. Eighteen months ago I was assembling the first 50 units by hand on our production line in China, and now we’re shipping over 2,500 a month.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.