Written by David Conway

In January 2023, we moved our R&D office from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. What a wonderful year to be here! Building Purcell in Santa Cruz has been the best decision for the company. Thank you for this supportive and earth centered community. 

Looking back, 2023 was a pivotal year for Purcell. We were pushed to rethink how we approach growth and development. We were challenged to trust the knowledge and engineering skills we developed over the last 5 years and stand on our own two feet. 

In 2022, we built the S1. It is truly a groundbreaking product that earned us international attention. The S1 is like a Ferrari, an engineering masterpiece with over 1,200 parts. However, it required complex engineering and manufacturing partnerships which were impacted by the turmoil in eastern Europe.

In early 2023, we found ourselves prepared to build a product on our own. In a year, we built the M1 going from inception to mass production ready. The M1 is simpler than the S1 yet retains 75% of the functionality, allowing us to get our product into our customers’ hands faster and generate revenue.

I am proud of what we accomplished over the last year, thank you to our Santa Cruz community for supporting us through it. 

In November, we secured funding which will be used to mass manufacture the M1 dispenser. This kicked off a new round of development from finding the right manufacturing partner in Asia to reengineering the M1 dispenser for mass production. 

This is a short video we made of our year. 

Please use this link for a slideshow of Q4.

About Purcell
Purcell (formerly SmartBins) is an innovative retail merchandising equipment company based in Santa Cruz, California. We are a product-driven team with deep roots in design and engineering. Our mission is to advance ‘packaged-at-purchase’ retailing to realize the benefits of a hyper-efficient bulk supply chain.