The Iron City Product Council’s first in person meeting was last month at Hardware Park.
When Ethan Summers was recruited to lead Fledging, a startup that makes consumer electronics, he felt like he was on an island, as most entrepreneurs do.
So he decided to do something about it and found he wasn’t alone.
Summers, Fledging’s CEO, created the Iron City Product Council (ICPC) as a collaborative effort to consolidate Birmingham’s wealth of resources and talent for entrepreneurs in the hardware and product-based space looking to sell a physical product on a national and international scale – a think tank to help work through challenges.
Connection is the goal of the group, Summers said, eventually linking every Birmingham startup or small business that makes, ships, sells or supports physical products with each other.
“I have been very surprised by its success and how much people have engaged,” Summers said. “In Startupland, you spend so much time heads down working that it’s easy to feel like you’re alone and no one else is facing the same challenges as you are. There’s a need to reach out to someone and be a community – let’s help each other, because we have the same problems.”
Since its inception last year, ICPC has grown from nine founding members to 28, from companies like CONSERV, Deft Dynamics, TruSpin, YUVA Biosciences, Fledging, Purilan Technology and more. It boasts 10 partner organizations like Red Mountain Makers, MAKEbhm and Hardware Park, where the council held its first in-person meetup in late September – a shift from the robust email chain that’s been in existence since late 2019. The meeting took a deep dive on product marketing and networking.
“The reason for the creation of the Iron City Product Council is increasing connection amongst member and partner organizations,” said Brian Jennings, vice president of economic development at the Birmingham Business Alliance, which helped support the organization in its formation. “That type of camaraderie and support is what makes Birmingham the unique place to do business that it is, and examples of that like the ICPC help us show companies outside the region that here in Birmingham, we do better when we collaborate and work together. Individually, the members of ICPC are makers, but together they form a knowledgeable collective with a passion for problem-solving and collaboration. The ICPC realizes the value of the people, companies and partnerships within our community and is focused on building the Birmingham maker-space ecosystem.”
It’s free to join and benefits include engineering and design solutions, programming and education, and, probably most important in the COVID-19 era of isolation, social networks. Studies show, Bolus said, that innovation happens faster in cities than in rural communities because of community and crosstalk, noting that resource networks like ICPC can save companies years of work because of collaborations.
“Collaboration drives success,” said Daniel Bolus, community outreach director at Hardware Park, COO at Purilan Technology Inc. and the vice president of the ICPC. “Ultimately, no matter how great your product is, if you don’t have a community of people helping you all the way from making it to selling it, you’ll find it’s really a lot harder to be in business when you’re isolated.”
When Summers moved to Birmingham from Atlanta, he said one of the most attractive aspects of the city was its community. Great networking and partnerships were always out there for the taking. Now, thanks to ICPC, there’s an organized way to connect.
“Community is the secret sauce of Birmingham,” Summers said. “Everyone here is happy to support each other and see each other thrive. No one is possessive or territorial about knowledge and are focused on helping each other succeed. That sense of community covers a lot of gaps.”