What did you and your partners do
before starting this company?
“Necessity is
of invention.”
I’m the sole founder and owner of the
company. Prior to HydroLogic, I was a
grower obsessed with trying out every
tool possible to produce consistently
high-grade product. Pretty much every-
thing that’s happened since then has
been my effort to leverage that passion
to build a company that enables
everyone to do the same. Now, we are
taking that momentum to a commercial
and industrial scale with HyperLogic’s
professional filtration systems.
How did you get into this industry?
I’m a grower myself. The quest for the
perfect plant begins with realizing most
tap water isn’t dialed in for optimal
growth. I learned this the hard way
and realized I needed much better
technology than what was available
in hydroponic retail stores at that time.
I assembled some filtration systems
with off-the-shelf parts that I needed
for my garden and it worked out pretty
well. Well enough, in fact, that all of a
sudden, my buddies wanted the same
garage-built filtration system for their
own gardens. And then boom, it just
exploded from there. It’s funny because
the conversations I’m having with guys
with multi-million-dollar operations
are not dissimilar from the ones I
was having with people who didn’t
understand why their little garden was
failing all those years ago.
When and where did
the company begin?
Santa Cruz, California. It’s famous for
smart hippies so, makes sense some
serious growers are here.
How does your company
philosophy translate
to opportunities?
Necessity is the mother of invention. I
needed a better water filter, so I built one.
A 100-gallon-per-day reverse
osmosis system I called “The
Stealth-RO” because it was a
stealthy operation in my garage
and it’s mainly all black in color. Then there were countless hours
on the road visiting stores and
spreading the gospel of water
filtration. Demand for our products
grew quickly. HydroLogic has
been dedicated to refining these
water filters on so many levels:
efficiency, conservation, ease of us,
not to mention price. But I’m most
proud of how we’ve nailed down
our customer service pipeline. We
make sure our customers are taken
care of and I believe our reputation
and market share speaks to that.
What were some of your struggles
as you started the business? Has your company moved or
expanded since the beginning?
Space. I was working out of my garage.
When I outgrew that, I rented a shipping
container I kept in my side yard. Next,
I shared the soil room with Santa Cruz
Hydroponics, then eventually my own
warehouse, and today we operate out
of a state-of-the-art, 20,000-foot facility.
I also did everything myself…wore all
the hats for the first year or so. We have done nothing but grow in the
past few years, so yeah, we’ve had to
increase our physical footprint at least
three times in the past half decade. It’s
no t really slowing down for us either.
The water out there isn’t getting any
cleaner; unfortunately, it’s the opposite.
How did you overcome them? We sell everything from personal scale
to municipal scale water filtration
systems. Our most popular hobby line
is still the Stealth-RO, which remains
the best-selling hydroponic water filter
in the world. But it’s been amazing to
watch the commercial department grow
so quickly in the past few years. We
build all of the commercial systems
from scratch, completely customized to
the operation’s source water chemistry.
What did you first produce?
Bit the bullet and spent the money on a
larger space and hired one employee!
How did you gain market
share and recognition?
Well, believe it or not (former
Maximum Yield co-owner) Linda
Jesson convinced me to do my very
first trade show in San Francisco in
2006. That thrust me into the market
immediately. I also did a lot of adver-
tising with and wrote educational
articles for Maximum Yield magazine.
What is your current product line?
Where do you distribute?
USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe,
Central and South America.
Maximum Yield
77