Niche manufacturing a way to build our future

Jay Kuten PHOTO/FILE

We can justly celebrate the positive attributes of our city as the signs of the coming summer lighten hearts and diminish the need for outer cover. Our river city assets of beautiful land and talented people are our strength. But we know that our city lacks for central governmental support and we must make our own future.

One way forward for our small provincial city consists of development of niche manufacturing. Niche manufacture is the development and application of engineering expertise to areas of manufacturing neglected by the larger enterprises often because of problems of scale. We already have an example of such an enterprise - Pacific Helmets.

To say Pacific Helmets makes protective helmets is to skim the surface of their product line, which is the making of headgear with wide applicability in a variety of circumstances in which safety, flexibility and lightness are essential. Meeting all these needs has made this company a winner of contracts to fireman worldwide.

According to CEO David Bennett, it all began when his wife encouraged him to compete for tender to the NZ Fire Service. He had one month to make the prototype that won. It won over that of a Canadian company. Before that tender process and the alert from his wife, Bennett had been over in Australia, selling motorcycle helmets. Now he and Pacific Helmets are here but known everywhere.

A brief disclaimer: I have no financial or other beneficial interest in Pacific Helmets. It's simply an excellent example of successful small manufacturing.

Here we see the workings of flexibility and engineering skill wresting opportunity for success in a niche market through the challenge of competition.

These same elements could be harnessed by some of the skilful people in our community to create their own version of successful small manufacture. Here's one way. The council could create a competition, the annual award of the Initiative Wanganui Prize for the successful creation of an original project that has marketable potential and is manufacture-ready. For such a prize to be a real stimulus to competition it would have to provide a significant sum for award - $10,000, say.

The funding source does not have to be the ratepayers (although any new industry here benefits all of us) but could be solicited from the business community, the Chamber of Commerce, or other potential philanthropic sources whose mission it is to foster the growth of our city through promotion of business.

Let me carry this suggestion a bit further by offering one area for exploration and development by people with the skills of engineering and manufacture.

We have a good number of older people living here. Hearing diminution is a fact of growing old. That is a niche market.

I know in the US and in New Zealand, hearing aids are a serious expense, costing well into the thousands for a good one. Furthermore, even the best hearing aids are not perfect in that they may fail to filter ambient noises or selectively amplify sounds of higher pitch more than lower (or vice versa). I would be glad for the correction of my understanding, but to my knowledge hearing aids are miniature sound amplifiers.

A normally-sized sound amplifier that works marvellously with music and other sounds along the audible spectrum costs in the neighbourhood of $300 or even much less. Over the years, as amplifiers have become more sophisticated, the price has come down. Not hearing aids. Their price is slowly but inexorably rising to even $6000-$8000.

This provides an opportunity for skilled entrepreneurial engineers, working with familiarity of ear anatomy to develop miniature amplification technology that is both successfully functional and of low price to be competitive and available to the elderly and hard-of-hearing everywhere.

Is such a proposal over-ambitious for us? Is it even feasible? Well, there's the undeniable DIY in Kiwi DNA.

To paraphrase my 2-year-old granddaughter, Gemma, in the act of pulling up her socks: "(I)We can do it!"

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.