A really nice grill brush will cost you about $25 at your local big box store, but YouTuber Destin Sandlin is betting he can get customers to shell out three times that amount for a Made-in-America version.
Sandlin traces his passion for US manufacturing to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when he was bothered by the lack of American-made essential goods.
“Everybody wanted N95 masks and face shields, and they couldn’t get it,” he said in a recent YouTube video. “This revealed to me how anemic our manufacturing capacity in America has become, because I was waiting on some billionaire to come save us, and it didn’t happen.”
So began a yearslong deep dive into the challenges of making products in the US, which Sandlin documented for his series on YouTube called “Smarter Every Day.”
After working with John Youngblood, the owner of a local specialty grill accessories company, Sandlin got excited about the idea of developing a better scrubber. Sandlin and Youngblood wanted to produce it in the US with as many domestically sourced components as possible, and sell it at a retail price.
In a video that went live Sunday and has since amassed more than 2 million views, Sandlin shares why he decided to get serious about US manufacturing, explains how he navigated the design process, and makes a sales pitch for viewers to buy it for themselves.
On Tuesday, Youngblood told Business Insider the $75 scrubber has sold through its initial production run of several thousand units within a day, and his company is now taking pre-orders.
“We’re going to have a backlog for a while,” Youngblood said.
Most grill brushes are meant to be thrown away. This one isn’t.
Many lower-cost grill brushes aren’t typically designed to last more than a year of use — grill-maker Weber recommends changing them after each grilling season. Another problem is that the bristles have been known to come off and can end up in grilled food.
Sandlin and Youngblood found that welded chain mail — like the material of a medieval knight’s armor — was highly effective at cleaning grill grates without breaking.
There was one problem: “We could only find it in China.”
After a few tries, the team managed to find a US supplier who could make about 2,000 units a month and a supplier in India to augment the rest.
Attaching the chain mail to a handle proved to be another adventure.
Sandlin said the average one-inch industrial bolt costs around 9 cents when imported, but that jumps to 38 cents for versions made in the US.
“Most machine shops I talked to directly, they said, ‘Yeah, we can’t even get the material for the price of the finished bolts that you’re getting from a foreign supplier,'” Sandlin said.
Then there was the process of making injection-molded parts to provide support and flexibility, which required machining custom tools and dies (the metal forms that shape a material) for shops to use in production.
“This is the moment where this whole experiment came into focus for me,” Sandlin said. “I realized at that moment we’re screwed.”
American manufacturing has exported the smart part of making stuff
The reason for Sandlin’s pessimism is that many of the shops he spoke with send tool and die design files to China to be made and imported for use in US production lines.
“I don’t want my intellectual property in China, I want to make it here,” he said. “And they said, ‘Good luck.'”
The problem illuminated by this episode goes far beyond a seemingly simple grilling accessory.
“We’re screwed as a nation if we can’t do the intelligent work of tool and die: making the tools that make the things,” Sandlin said. “We have flipped it. We are now to the point where the smart stuff is done somewhere else.”
Sandlin and Youngblood eventually found US suppliers for all of their custom components. They’re working to get every piece sourced here.
The video shows two instances where Sandlin was surprised by the apparent country of origin being different from what he says he was led to believe: The first batch of knobs arrived in packaging stating they were made in Costa Rica rather than the US. Several boxes of chain mail (ostensibly from India) had markings that suggested they were instead from China.
“I’m shocked,” Sandlin said. “It’s pretty weird to set out to try to make a thing completely in America and to find out towards the end of the process that you made something in China anyways.”
Sandlin says he’s not interested in having America be the dominant world player — he wants more opportunities for people here to have good jobs that allow them to take care of their communities.
“If you are ever, ever in a position to make a decision about where your thing is manufactured, take a second and consider making a little less profit, maybe in order to invest in your local community,” he said.
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