Farm toys handmade in Kansas
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Jodi:
Tell me a little bit about Burns and have you lived there for a long time? Big town, small town?
Larry:
Burns is a small town. I think population's about 250 people. We're in a rural setting. Our closest grocery store is 20 miles away basically. We are right on the west edge of Flint Hills. And so one side of Burns you get into farm ground. West of Burns you get in the farm ground and east of Burns is mainly prairie grass. A beautiful place to live.
Jodi:
Has your family been there for a long time?
Larry:
Yeah. My grandparents were raised in this area and then my parents were. And my parents moved away for a few years after they were married and then when I was about 12 years old, we moved back to this part of the country and I've lived here ever since. And then we've raised our family here.
Jodi:
Talk about the family business. How did you get started with a line of smokers?
Larry:
Everything like that happens by desperation. You get to where you need money, you need work, you need a product and it's something that just happens. You can't necessarily push it along. My dad and I started this business in 1981 and I was still in high school. Then in the eighties, the farm economy was pretty tough and things got pretty tight around here with the agriculture work and building agriculture equipment.
Larry:
So Dad ended up designing a smoker and it was popular with his friends and with the people that used it. And it just grew from there. Then we built a business and sold that business in 2006. We still build a few smokers, but the big smoker business we had, we sold it off and that allowed Dad to retire.
Jodi:
Okay. So then Larry, you took over and kind of continued with a welding shop, is that right?
Larry:
I have had ownership in it since '86. I've owned the manufacturing myself since '86 and Dad had the sales end of the business. And so when he retired, it wasn't necessarily me taking over, it was him giving up his part of it.
Jodi:
And so then you went to a tech school in high school to learn and welding, is that correct? Or did you learn it from your father?
Larry:
I learned welding mainly from my dad, but when I was in high school, it was an option for us to go to the local tech school and to take classes there while we were junior or senior. And I took a Vo-Ag class my junior year, which was mainly welding and stuff. And it helped me learn different parts of welding and things like that.
Jodi:
And that has served you very well over the past few years. So you guys have expanded to other models of smokers, corn header sweeps, and other custom metal work. What are you doing now? And we'll get into the toys here a little bit.
Larry:
Right now we are doing some custom work for other companies. We build a product which is a loading shoot, which mounts on the back of a cattle pot, and you can load and unload cattle right off the ground or right to the ground with it. And we build it for another company. And then we have a product that is a Longhorn squeeze chute and it's a little different design than a regular squeeze chute because of the horns on the cattle and we build that for another company also.
Jodi:
What's different with that? The horns, obviously they're going to stick out the side. So, do you account for that so no one gets impaled?
Larry:
No, you just got so much mass in horns that they won't go through a regular squeeze chute. So you have to have panels that come together in different ways and the horns stick out the panels. It's something new for us because we've never been around that either.
Larry:
And then we do a lot of repair work. A lot of one time jobs, we call it job shop work. We don't do the same thing every day. Then we've got into the toys.
Jodi:
Yeah. The toys. And Zac, I think this is where your part of the story comes in. Tell me about the very first idea for a toy. How did that come to be?
Zac:
I think I was pretty young and Dad and I built a set of toys, set of panels and never quite worked right, so we kind of benched the idea. And then I went to college and when I come back over Christmas break, there wasn't a lot of work for me to do here in the shop. So we pulled that idea off the shelf and really put some time into making a product that we thought we could sell and expand the business with.
Jodi:
What was your first toy? Oh, the panels.
Zac:
It was the panels.
Jodi:
And what did you do with them?
Zac:
We just made them more manufacturable, easier and more profitable to produce in mass quantities.
Jodi:
What other toys are you guys making right now?
Zac:
We have gone from the basic panels to a full working facility, 16th scale. We've got straight alley, sort alley, loading chute, squeeze chute, and we've got tanks and bunks. And we've also moved into the equipment. We've got a pickup with a bale bed and a cake box on it. We've got trailers, a semi, mixer beds. This year we just added a dump truck and a grain truck to the semis. I think the direction we're kind of moving with that is a little more into the construction. Around here a lot of the farmers are buying construction equipment to help on the farm, gaining popularity in our area.
Jodi:
Toys though, they probably can't do a whole lot of digging and stuff like that, but they're fun to have.
Zac:
Oh, they do have a high loader, so they can play in the sandbox.
Jodi:
Oh, excellent. Walk me through the process. Pick one toy and walk me through the process of how it's made.
Larry:
We start out with the four by sheet of metal. And the first step is it goes to our computerized plasma cutter and we cut all the parts out with the plasma cutter and then the parts go to our sander and we sand them and clean them up. And then they go to our metal break and we put all the bins in. Well, then we take the pieces and put them together and we weld them. So we weld them together. And then we take a hand sander or grinder and we sand all the rough edges or corners off of everything to where they're round and it gives them a finished look.
Larry:
Then after that we wash them, wash the grease off of them, the dirt off of them. And we take them to our paint system and we powder paint them. It's a powder coat finish, which is plastic powder granules that are sprayed onto it. And then we hang them in an oven for 10 minutes and heat them up and it melts that powder into a coating. And we paint them that way, which gives them a durable finish.
Larry:
And then we bring them back to the shop and we assemble our tires on them or windshields. We use vinyl stickers for windshields. And put our flat beds on them and the bale loaders and the feed boxes. And that's pretty much a process on that.
Jodi:
How long on average does it take to make one toy?
Larry:
We don't build anything one at a time. The pickups or anything, we're to the point, we usually build 25 at a time. So it's hard to have an exact estimate or guess. But I don't know. What would we have? We build a couple pickups in a day from start to finish, maybe.
Jodi:
So you guys have quite the production now, but Zac, after you started making your panels and everything, when did you guys start selling them and how did you sell them?
Zac:
My grandpa and my brother were going to farm shows, I just kind of threw them in the truck with them. And they went and showed them at farm shows. And once they took off, we really decided that we needed to expand from our starter kit. And it just added one piece at a time from that.
Jodi:
And these are heirloom quality. These aren't stickered with “Made in China”.
Zac:
No.
Jodi:
Now I understand Larry, you have four kids, two sons, two daughters, and you have some grandkids too. Are they your quality control on the toys? Is that how it works?
Larry:
Well, we call the three boys in one family, they're my R and D department, that stands for “wreck and destroy”. If they stand up for them, they're good quality. And that's just joking.
Jodi:
Oh, I bet they love them too. After the farm shows and everything, where are you selling them now? Are they going cross country? Around the world?
Larry:
We have toys in Alaska. We have toys that we've shipped this year to Alberta, Canada. I've heard of people buying toys and sending them overseas to family members. Otherwise our main area is just in the United States here, but we never know where they end up at. The farm shows and the craft shows that we hit are right here in the central, in the Midwest. We hit Oklahoma and Kansas, Missouri, that's our main area for the show we hit. We've got a toy store in Nebraska and we just do what we can.
Jodi:
Is it just the two of you that work on them or do you have other employees or family members?
Larry:
It depends how desperate we are for having the product at the time. Anymore I try to do a lot of it myself. Zac has some parts of it that he does. Our truck beds, it's kind of his responsibility. When we're building pens and corrals and stuff like that, he does more of that too probably. But typically his brother and him are busy doing the regular shop work and so I try to do as much of the toy work as I can.
Jodi:
How many toys are you up to now? Do you have a count of how many different types you have?
Larry:
Well with the trailers and everything that has wheels on it, I think we're about 13 different items. And then with the pens, we probably have another 12 items there on different parts of it.
Zac:
The nice thing about these is they can all go together. They all matched. It's a set that you just can keep adding, you can have your full farm.
Jodi:
So what are your future plans? Are you going to be adding anymore to your miniature farm? What's coming up? Can you give us a hint?
Zac:
Like I said, we're kind of going into the construction side of things. In the next few years we're possibly looking at an excavator and some more equipment in that area. Usually we do our work on producing new models when we're slow. So if we get a slow time this summer we'll really put some time into them.
Jodi:
Would the excavator have moving parts?
Zac:
That's the plan.
Larry:
We're planning on it, be able to use your hand to dig with it and load a truck.
Jodi:
What fun.
Larry:
It's a challenge.
Jodi:
Heck I wouldn't mind playing with that. Sounds like a lot of fun. Is there anything else that you two would like to chat about? About the way your business is going and so forth?
Larry:
Well, I think one thing we have to say is that it's not our greatness that has made any of this happen. A lot of it is just the grace of God that has given us what we have and the abilities and the time and the thought on what to do. Our faith is very important to us in this.
Jodi:
Excellent. And is this a business that you plan on, Zac passing down to your children?
Zac:
If they want it. We'll see.
Jodi:
If they want it, that's just the way it always goes. If they want it.
Zac:
It's kind of generational, I think.
Jodi:
Yeah. Tell me where can people find you if they want to find your toys online?
Zac:
You can find us at Facebook with Goodwin Miniatures. We do have a website, it's Goodwinindustries.net. You can find us there. And those are two main sources other than shows is the website and our Facebook.
Jodi:
Okay. One other question I had, what is the price range of the toys?
Larry:
We range, like our feed picked ups, we are looking at $180 on a two door pickup with a bale loader and feed box. I always tell people that's the cheapest feed pickup they'll ever buy and it'll last the longest. But then we get up into some of our products up in the $500 range at this point. It's good quality stuff, so we can't just tell you how cheap it is, but we can tell it's the best quality you'll find.