Kurt Avery
Chairman, Sawyer Products
The Basics
Company Name: Sawyer Products
Location: Safety Harbor, FL
Founded: 1984
Full-Time Employees: Small Business
Products: Water Filtration, Insect Repellent, Sunscreen, & First Aid
Social: Youtube Instagram Twitter
Claim to Fame: Every Product is State of the Art, Best in its Field.– At Sawyer, we only bring products to market that are driving the technology further.
The Culture
The best thing about working at Sawyer is:
We are disruptors who are making the world a better place to live and saving lives.
When we’re not working, we’re:
Obsessing over the business. When that is done, we are out enjoying the outdoors. We are based in Florida, so we are never too far away from a swamp to test product.
What we’re reading:
Marketing Books. As a company we must read at least 15 marketing books a year. This can be on the changing generations, expanding product categories or the best way to redesign our packaging to attract customers from their perspective. Our customers guide our business and understand them we must understand what/why they are thinking/what is important to them in their day to day lives. We spend most of our time attempting to read our customer’s needs and wants.
What we’re listening to:
TED Talks, YouTube and Customer comments. We want to know what out customers are thinking and if you look hard enough, they will tell you via their videos, posts, and Tweets. We are obsessed with meeting our customers where they are, and this means about every six months we redefine our marketing and go to market strategy. We would love to stick with one plan, but we are listening and when the customer says move, we move.
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
Impossible Dream – Sawyer was started with the hope to solve the world’s two greatest causes of loss of human life each year – bug borne and water borne illnesses. Each day we start work hoping that we can get to a point where everyone in the world has access to clean water and is free from the pests that plague their day to day living. We are working on it, but it is an impossible dream that we are going to solve every water/bug issue across the globe. But we keep trying each day.
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
Inclusion matters everywhere. Everything in life is an experience and experiences build who we are and what we will become. At Sawyer, we believe that everyone should have the same access and opportunities to be included whatever activity they see fit. No one has the right to stifle anyone individual creativity or their chance to find out something about themselves. We see ourselves as outside of the box thinkers and we are passionate about supporting everyone in finding their experience. Especially if it is outside a “created” box.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
Our filters will have saved millions of lives and improved even more across the world while at the same time eliminating the huge amount of fossil fuels used to clean drinking water.