Taking Off in Cyberspace
Jerry Teisan has been designing, building and flying model airplanes since he was 6, so it didn’t seem like a great leap to start selling his creations to others two years ago.
But what began as a part-time hobby in his garage has mushroomed into a full-time business with six radio-controlled models that waltz out of his warehouse to customers worldwide to the tune of 700 per month.
These aren’t the flimsy wood models you remember from childhood either--they retail for between $45 and $100 each.
The 55-year-old Venice-based entrepreneur uses virtually indestructible expanded polypropylene instead of traditional balsa wood in his model planes. He sells the planes largely through his Web site (https://www.zagi.com).
“This is a high-tech business,” Teisan said. “Everybody in radio control is plugged into the Internet. I have clients in South Africa [and] Australia whom I’ve never seen but we’re like friends now.”
In fact, almost half of Teisan’s sales take place over the Internet, which leads him to wonder how specialty manufacturers like his firm, called Trick R/C, ever survived without it. Thanks in large part to online marketing, his business has doubled each year and is slated to quadruple this year.
“The Internet just exploded it so well,” Teisan said. “Plus I have very small overhead. I make everything myself. This is a family business.”
(Teisan employs his mother and brother part time for bookkeeping and packing to ensure a same-day turnaround on orders).
Trick R/C planes “are the hot ticket as far as foam gliders go because they’re basically indestructible,” said Mark Davis, manager of Hobby Shack in Pasadena, which stocks the model airplanes.
Teisan has turned hobbies into careers for most of his life. He became a commercial photographer because he loved cameras. He enjoyed fishing and worked for years commercially out of Marina del Rey, hauling in shark in the summer, lobster in winter.
But in 1996, after receiving an enthusiastic response for his models from other hobbyists, he started his own firm, using computer-aided design to create his planes, which buyers launch and control with small hand-held radio computers.
“Entry-level flyers usually break the wood models, so they spend more time building than flying. My planes give them more stick time to learn, plus they can also use them in combat [and] bash and crash each other out of the sky and there’s no damage,” Teisan said.
Testimonials from satisfied customers on his Web site attest to this.
“Nobody could believe how easy they were to fly,” Stephen Rohman of Kansas said in an e-mail message. “And when you reduce the fear of crashing to zero, the fun factor goes up exponentially.”
Teisan’s next big step is hiring a distributor. Since he started selling wholesale to Hobby Shacks and other chains, his volume has grown so fast that he can no longer handle it alone, even when putting in 60 hours a week at his unorthodox business.
Of course, that includes flying time.
“I have to test the product,” he said. “You bet.”
Freelance writer Denise Hamilton can be reached at garza@netvoyage.net
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