Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Hannula. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Established in 2012 in San Luis Obispo & currently based in San Diego and SLO, Jaime and Carl Holm got their start when Jaime came home with a vintage trailer and a grand idea. That grand idea turned into 30+ Vintage Trailers that were used as rentals for weddings, TV commercials, private events, corporate parties, and more. Through the years of designing and building trailers, Jaime’s natural ability for design led to experiential marketing jobs revolving heavily around custom design and fabrication. As Tinker Tin continued to leverage their ability to design beautiful things, build them, and do it in impossible timelines, they needed to scale to from a mom-and-pop trailer company to what they are today!
Around 6 years ago Tinker Tin brought on brother, Matthew Hannula to scale the company to what it is today, a little less trailer activations and little more full fledge retail display manufacture with manufacturing capabilities in the US, Mexico, and China.
Their expertise in hard to navigate build spaces, challenging build materials, and impossible timelines sets them apart. Tinker Tin has built a living off of capturing clients’ creative ideas and designs and bringing them to life. What started as design and build for retail activations turned into full-scale retail store build-outs and 1000s of custom-designed retail fixtures.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There has been a lot of trial and error, figuring things out on the fly, fine-tuning, perfecting, failing, and restarting all over again! Like every entrepreneur our true strength is in our team and our resilience, as well as our ability to pivot quickly!
As the world is today there has been every challenge that all companies are experiencing with supply chain issues of material, availability, logistics, etc.
Some of our other greatest challenges have been finding the right people to grow. We see this as a challenge because we have taken a lot of care and time to make sure we are hiring right. We have an incredibly awesome team, and they are what makes Tinker Tin. It has taken a lot of time to find this team that we have!
As you know, we’re big fans of Tinker Tin. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
We are a Retail Display Manufacture building out custom retail displays from tables, cabinets, racking, cash registers, facades, signage, and anything else inside a retail store. Alongside retail displays we provide custom design and build for tradeshows such as NFR and large festivals like Stagecoach!
We specialize in designing and building products that speak to the brand of our clients. Long are the days of basic cookie-cutter retail displays like you see in Ross or Walmart. Brands are transitioning all their brick-and-mortar stores to give an experience and provide a feeling for their customers. Our success comes from our ability to feel, see, and touch a brand in a way that we can design and build fixtures that tell the brand story and allow the brand customers to feel it every time they enter our clients’ building. We have always been a design-first company and we believe design is not a math problem but a culmination of experiences that render a feeling, a taste, a visual that is authentic, genuine, real, and human.
We are most proud of how we have grown as a company! Coming from very humble beginnings with a few dollars, some good and bad ideas, some hard work, and a lot of luck has to be our proudest moment. The journey has not been easy to say the least but when we get the chance to sit back and look at where we have come it is a very proud moment! To be able to design and build beautiful things for our incredible clients and employee some incredible people is an absolute blessing!
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Risk is certainly an interesting topic for Tinker Tin. From a wide view, I think every job we have taken on in our first 6 years of business was risky, but we have always figured out how to make it work!
Since the business has pivoted into full-scale manufacturing, we take much more calculated risks. We do not say YES to every job. We make sure we are right for our clients and our clients are right for us. When building custom fixtures at scale there are a lot of moving parts so having the respect and trust from our clients mutually is what helps us be successful with our clients.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tinkertin.com
- Instagram: @tinkertincompany
