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Posted: Mon, June 28, 2004
Profile: Metal Styli Metal Styli is the company that puts the style in stylus. With a range of steel, copper, aluminium and titanium styli that can be finished in silver, gold and platinum, Metal Styli brings luxury to your PDA, and more importantly, better pen performance. A young company based at Swansea Institute of Higher Education, Metal Styli caught the judges' attention in both the LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards in 2003 and the Technology Wales competition this year. Matt Pearce chats to Managing Director, Mark Hammill, about the beginnings and the future of the innovative Swansea start-up.  How did you get into producing high performance styli? I originally made one for myself while I was studying product design at Swansea Institute. After positing a picture of it on a Pocket PC site it had a huge response and I decided it was worth a go. What are the benefits of a metal stylus? Apart from being more attractive the stylus is much heavier and is balanced to make it more comfortable to use. All of the designs have more grips to reduce the pressure required to hold them firmly. They are also very strong and if their tips wear out they can be easily replaced.  Is there a growing market for luxury styli? The market for luxury styli is growing as more people become aware of them, and so is the competition. The PDA market is however starting to level off as many of the features become incorporated into mobile phones. Hopefully the combined PDA and mobile phone devices will still use styli in the future and keep sales up. Who buys your styli, and where do they come from? The stainless steel styli are mostly sold to young businessmen and students, although we sell a lot of silver and occasionally gold styli to more affluent businessmen and women, especially those in the IT industry. Most of our sales started off in America but as sales of PDAs in Europe have caught up, local sales have also increased.  How have the links with SIHE helped you? Swansea Institute has been a great help. They have provided a lot of support and advice as well as use of their workshops and an incubation office. I have already been in the office for a year and hope to stay here for as long as I can. What's the process of designing, producing and selling the styli? Once I have chosen which styli are likely to be the most popular, I design them in CAD using the same software that I was taught to use at SIHE. As soon as the designs are finished I send them straight to the manufacturer. Most of our styli have been relatively simple to manufacture so far using CNC equipment, but as the designs get more complex so do the machines that are necessary. The next stainless steel styli will probably have to be manufactured in China due to the increased competition, but the unique and precious styli will still be made using local companies. We have a few resellers around the world but most of our sales are done through our webstore: www.metalstyli.com  Your company was commended in both the LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards in 2003 and the Technology Wales competition this year. Has this recognition helped the company? It has certainly helped bring Metal Styli to the attention of other local companies as well as manufactures for future stylus designs and maybe more. The biggest thing to come from any of the events I have attended recently is a contract with a company called Sequence in Cardiff to develop a Pocket PC Tour Guide which relays interactive content to the visitor depending on which exhibit they are viewing. How has having an e-Commerce site enhanced Metal Styli? I don't think that Metal Styli would have started or run successfully without it. I am now in the middle of upgrading the site as I have learnt a lot more about the possibilities of Pocket PC and PC web pages in the past couple of years, and intend to replace it with a whole new site in the next few months. To reduce the e-Commerce costs I am also changing to a new system with the help of Andrew Downie from another Spinout company called Netbop.  What one piece of advice would you give to start-ups in your field? I have found Swansea to be a very good place to base a company and the KEF Scholarship and Spinout have both been essential and very helpful. Personally I find the running of a company to be a bit of a distraction from the design and manufacture that I would prefer to concentrate on, and I'm looking forward to employing some staff to help in the future once I move to a larger office. For now I'm getting a lot of help from Sharon Rouse at yet another Spinout company: 21st Century Business Solutions. Where next for Metal Styli? As well as the Pocket PC and Tablet PC styli I hope to introduce more products to personalise PDAs further such as gold buttons, metal housings, etc. Separately from the webstore I also hope to continue with further contract design work in the PDA market. I currently write hardware and software reviews for the site Mobile Minds and hope to incorporate this side of things with the new Metal Styli website pretty soon.  Links:www.metalstyli.comSequence Netbop 21st Century Business Solutions Mobile Minds |
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