Turning Tariffs into Opportunity: How Mosaic Manufacturing is Developing Trust in a Volatile ClimateTurning Tariffs into Opportunity: How Mosaic Manufacturing is Developing Trust in a Volatile Climate

Turning Tariffs into Opportunity: How Mosaic Manufacturing is Developing Trust in a Volatile Climate Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. And you. 

Jeff White: I’m doing great. Yeah. Mid-deep summer timeframe. 

Carman Pirie: Something like that.

Jeff White: Nice to be recording some fresh episodes. 

Carman Pirie: That’s what everybody wants to do on summer vacation. 

Jeff White: Exactly. Record podcasts. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. 

Jeff White: Inside. Close the windows. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I’m excited for today’s conversation. Look, I have a former life in politics, having been hired to work in politics back when I was young and foolish. And I like it when our marketing podcast intersects with today’s geopolitical reality, and it always makes for an interesting conversation. So I’m excited for today’s guest. 

Jeff White: These are interesting times. Yes. Always. Probably never less. Interesting. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I could do with some boring times. Let’s sign me up for some boredom, please. 

Jeff White: Accurate, accurate. I’m not really sure if that’s gonna happen though. Looking forward to getting into it. So joining us today is Alexandra Corey, Allie is the Director of Marketing from Mosaic Manufacturing. Welcome to The Kula Ring Alley.

Alexandra Corey: Thank you. Happy to be here. 

Jeff White: Glad to have you on the show. 

Carman Pirie: It’s awesome to have you on the show. And I’d love to learn more about mosaic manufacturing. What are you all up to about Mosaic? 

Alexandra Corey: Yeah, so Mosaic’s an additive manufacturing company. Essentially, we build 3D printers. We’re based outta Canada. We’ve been around since 2014. Most people who are familiar with the 3D printing space will know Mosaic for our pallet products. So Mosaic really was a pioneer in multicolour Multimaterial 3D printing; the printing palette itself wasn’t actually a 3D printer, it was an add-on to 3D printers. We really pioneered that space and set the groundwork for what is now a pretty common feature. Multicolour Multimaterial 3D printing, the founders are three of them. They realize that. Where 3D printing really could make a huge impact on the world was in the B2B space, and that was the direction that they wanted to go with their products. Multicolour multimaterial was becoming pretty commonplace in consumer-type printers, but B2B was underdeveloped in some of the areas that they saw Mosaic adding value. So you launch the Element printer, a standalone desktop-sized printer. Really unique for its high temperature capabilities, so it can print industrial materials. Like peak, PCF, nylon, things that are typically difficult to get in a printer of that size. And then, most recently, we launched our Array printing platform. So Array’s an automated 3D printer. It’s actually comprised of four elements that are controlled with an industrial gantry and intelligence software. So it really enables people to take the value of 3D printing, remove the labour intensity, and scale up operations so it can be something that really works in a manufacturing environment.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s an exciting space to be involved in. And I wonder, how long have you been with the firm? How did you end up there? 

Alexandra Corey: I’ve only been with Mosaic for about a year now. But I’m not new to emerging techs, so I started with the company in September of last year. Prior to that, I was working in Silicon Valley for an augmented reality company. Sounds pretty different. 3D printing, augmented reality, but there is a lot of overlap actually. In many cases, it’s about shortening supply chains and quicker access to prototyping and design iterations. And from a marketing perspective, you are not only selling or educating somebody about your company, you’re also educating them about a new technology that they’ve potentially never heard of. It was really fascinating, actually, to see how much overlap there was between those two industries. Prior to that, I had my own agency for about 10 years. Sold that and then moved over to the augmented reality company for a new challenge. 

Jeff White: And that’s an entirely different conversation we could have about what it’s like to go from running your own agency to being inside of a B2B Organization. But we’ll save that for another time, maybe. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I don’t think Allie wants to be our therapist, Jeff. 

Jeff White: No. But maybe we could be hers. Never know. We’ve probably seen some of the same things. 

Alexandra Corey: Oh my goodness. Blind leading the blind. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. I think folks there, our listeners, have a bit of a crystal ball, and they’re connecting the dots between my earlier commentary regarding geopolitics and the fact that 3D technology enables rapid scale and decrease in labour requirements, et cetera. They can probably connect some dots there and surmise that we might be talking about tariffs a little bit as part of this conversation. Admittedly, we’ve talked a little bit on The Kula Ring about tariffs already, but more just how marketers ought to be thinking about the opportunity that they present more writ large and what it might mean for driving awareness in new markets and the requirement to open up new markets.

What I love about your story, Allie, is that you’re… It’s a much more hands-on approach to how you’re actually reacting to the situation in real time. I’d love to understand and have you take us through the dynamics there. How is Mosaic? How are they thinking about the ongoing evolution of the tariff conversation, and how is it impacting your go-to-market?

Alexandra Corey: Tariffs are an interesting one for us because we are both… Victim’s not the right word. We are both subject to the impact of tariffs as a business. Obviously, we are made in Canada, but we have a lot of customers who are in the United States and around the world. And at the same time, we are a solution to the tariffs because, in particular, our Array system, which we sometimes call a microfactory, sometimes. Localizing their manufacturing allows them to do it very quickly. We can be up and running in 48 hours or less. And so customers are coming because they are trying to find an alternative to parts that they have traditionally sourced overseas. Lots of plastic parts are coming over. A ship from China can take a long time to get there, and can get very costly.

Those are the kind of things that you can very easily 3D print. And with our automation and Array, we’ve been able to do that in such a way that unlocks scale. So we’re coming at it from both sides of the story, and I think that gives us a unique perspective in really understanding what it is our customers are going through, but then also being able to help them navigate it.

That means from a go-to-mark… Oh, sorry, go ahead. 

Carman Pirie: Now I’m interrupting you ’cause I think you’re just about to answer the second part of my very long and winding question. So maybe, thankfully, we can break it up into two parts. I’d be curious if you have seen that initial bump about supply chain disruptions requiring more localized manufacturing. That sounds like a COVID story, if ever there was one, but I don’t know if the Array technology was available at the time of COVID. So is this something you’ve experienced and capitalized on before, or just that it wasn’t tariffs, it was through another lens? 

Alexandra Corey: The Array didn’t come out due to COVID, but COVID really put supply chains on the map in a way that they hadn’t really been a part of a mainstream conversation. I think manufacturers are always aware of and thinking about supply chains and where things were made and coming from and tariffs and all of these types of things, but you weren’t talking about it at a dinner party with your friends and family. And all of that changed obviously during COVID. And Array was very much being developed at that time and it doubled down on the need for it, not just as a way for people who are already 3D printing to be able to scale up their operations, but also for enterprises across the board to be able to get around some of these disruptions that we see more and more frequently in our currently globalized supply chain network.

Jeff White: The thing that I’m wondering is, obviously 3D printers at scale allow organizations to create parts or all kinds of different things in-house and avoid tariffs for themselves, but you are still competing, or Mosaic is still competing against manufacturers of 3D printers who may be in the US and would not necessarily be subject to tariffs when selling to other domestic companies.

How are you thinking about and going after those organizations that are looking at Mosaic as a Canadian-produced product? 

Alexandra Corey: Yeah, the key thing really for us is automation. One of the reasons that 3D printing isn’t always as readily adopted in manufacturing is that it is used for true production versus prototyping. It’s been used for a long time because there’s a limitation to scale. When you consider the amount of manual labour that’s involved in 3D printing, you need to manually load your filament, change your print beds, and monitor all your prints if you have one printer going at a time. Obviously, there are volume limitations for how many you can have at one time. So what Array really allows manufacturers to do is to remove the labour requirement. The throughput and then actually have true lights at manufacturing with 3D printing. So if you’re an American and you’re looking to purchase an American 3D printer, yes, you’re going to avoid tariffs, but you’re gonna need to buy five plus printers to do what one array can do. So that’s where that cost-benefit comes from, adopting an Array which just allows you to scale up your production that much more effectively. 

Carman Pirie: What a lovely little competitive advantage to have, or a lovely, large competitive advantage to have. 

Jeff White: Nice piece of technology you’ve created. Yeah. 

Alexandra Corey: Yeah.

It’s pretty cool. You’ll have to come see one sometime. 

Carman Pirie: That’s a fine idea. 

I guess, I am curious about how you’re messaging this and how you’re going to market with it, because I think a lot of manufacturers that operate cross border, especially those that are based in Canada, are struggling with how they talk about tariffs or even, do they say the T word or does, do they wait for the prospect to bring it up?

What, help me just unpack that a little bit. How are you? What has been your strategy for this, and how has it rolled out thus far? 

Alexandra Corey: Yeah, so firstly, I would say that the tariff conversation is part of our marketing, part of our messaging, of course. Not everything that we’re pinning our messaging to. So it’s just like every marketer can attest to, we’ve got many different facets to target, different niches within our industry, different pain points that they’re experiencing, and this is one of them. With respect to the conversation around Tariffs, we aren’t in the position of telling manufacturers what their challenges are and that we have all the answers and what it may be, but we wanna be able to be a resource for them as they are taking this journey in the same way that we’re taking this journey. And so what we’ve really tried to do is create resources for them to understand. How to leverage 3D printing, the technology that we offer, to get around tariffs. So we created a playbook, a guide on how to implement additive manufacturing into your supply chain. We have a lot of customers who are coming to us and saying, We get it. We know it’s a good idea, but where do we even start? What’s the next step? And so we created a really intuitive step-by-step guide if you’re looking to adopt additive manufacturing. Not just us. We have FFF 3D printing, which is where you extract filament out of a nozzle and build up your product layer by layer. For some companies, they’re not gonna necessarily need that type of 3D printing. They might need metal versus polymer. They might require something that’s a different process. We gave them the whole guidebook, including or excluding Mosaic, so that we can be a trusted source for them and a trusted advisor in navigating this current landscape.

Another thing that we found is everybody’s struggling with this right now, and getting smart people in a room to talk about it and share ideas is something that has really helped us be part of the conversation and part of the solution. So we’ve actually been hosting a series of events in our Toronto office. Where we partner with another manufacturer. We had a really cool quantum computing company. We had a really cool humanoid robotics company, another one in AI. And then we invite a lot of, manufacturers, although we did have people fly in from different states and countries for these events, and we just host a panel, we get people talking about it, we share the solutions that we have, the challenges that we face, and that has been hugely impactful just to start creating a network in a conversation around this challenge.

Jeff White: I imagine in some organizations, if you were to go to the C-suite and say, look, we’re going to go-to-market as the company that talks about the benefits of creating your own parts in order to avoid tariffs and be able to achieve supply chain resilience and all of this, but we’re also gonna do it and say, you don’t have to buy our stuff, you could buy other people’s.

Stuff like that creates an incredible amount of trust with prospects and existing customers. I think being willing to do that, but it may be a hard conversation to have with the executives, that you’re not necessarily going to be continually pushing Mosaic’s own products. Did you experience that, or was that kind of in the back of the minds of the folks that you’re working with already?

Alexandra Corey: Firstly, I think you hit the nail on the head with something, which is that we’re really trying to do is build trust in a very volatile landscape where it’s difficult for people to know what’s coming next. We wanna be a resource that can be trusted. I think with the events, that’s building trust, with being really transparent and attempting to be unbiased with our suggestions, that’s building trust. And in 3D printing, at the end of the day, we can talk about differences of printing, but if you need metal printing, not polymer printing, you’re not gonna be coming to us. So it’s not so much of a challenge in terms of whether they’re gonna pick one of our competitors? The hope is that if they’re looking for polymer and FFF additive manufacturing, and we’ve put out the resource, they’re gonna come and speak to us.

That being said, something that Mosaic has really built its brand on is really fantastic. Support, expertise and customer service. And so we’re willing to take that risk to find the customers that align with that value and are a good match for us. And so I think we’ve seen more benefit from it rather than people going elsewhere.

And hopefully we continue to, but I think, yeah, building relationships in B2B and manufacturing is just so important. And I think that’s one of the good ways of doing it. 

Carman Pirie: Do you get a sense, or have you tracked any data around the prospects that are engaged by that type of content, that are not ideal for you?

Do you have any kind of estimation as to the extent to which you’re simply serving to educate the market and being nice people versus driving meaningful B2B leads, and I don’t even say that pejoratively or negatively. I’m just wondering if people expect that if they take this more liberal approach to holistic. Yeah. Or altruistic. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Altruistic. They should expect X percent of just general market education-type people. I’m curious if you’ve peeled back any of those numbers. 

Alexandra Corey: If we have a wide enough data set of the kind of content that is potentially very neutral or promoting other types of additive or what it may be, but what it can tell you is what we have seen. Our organic traffic increased fairly substantially because we’re plugging into the kind of conversations that people are already having. We’re not trying to steer them away from the tariff conversation; people are already searching for things to do with how tariffs impact manufacturing. What Canadian businesses are doing to get around tariffs.

And rather than trying to avoid that conversation or direct it the way that we necessarily want it to go, we’re making ourselves part of that conversation. And as an extension of that, being able to capture some of that audience. 

Carman Pirie: That makes sense to me. Any negative reactions so far? 

Alexandra Corey: I wouldn’t say anything that’s concerning. But something that we have done is, like I said, building trust, people-first connections and so on. So we’ve been doing a lot of great videos of our CEO, in particular, a bit of a face of the company, talking about the impact that he has seen on our customers as a result of the tariffs he’s been implementing.

His own podcast and speeches at universities where he’s referenced this topic. And there are people who are maybe not as strong believers in additive, and where additive has gone, they still think about it as like the prototyping technology of 10 years ago. And so there will be a pushback. What I often find with the pushback is that maybe they are pushing back, like I said, on what they believe is additive. It is based on where it was 10 years ago, and it’s come so far that we just have to keep working on educating that market. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s not pushing back on the tariff narrative at all.

Alexandra Corey: It’s more kind of foundational than that on the belief that additive can be a solution to the tariff situation, and it’s never entirely going to replace a globalized supply chain. But if you’re paying tens of thousands of dollars on a piece of that supply chain, that can be replaced with an additive. Why not? 

Carman Pirie: And Allie, do you feel, based upon your experience and having that kind of executive leadership support for this messaging? How critical do you feel that is, if you’re going to go down the road of leveraging a more geopolitical topic for biz dev gain, if you will, which seems a little touchy potentially, is executive leadership carrying that message, a pretty key part of that, would you say? Is that a part of the playbook that you would not want to lose? 

Alexandra Corey: I think it was very much a top-down decision to lean in on this messaging. Also, we’ve got a very close-knit team, I think, that has a very clear and concise vision. So across the company, we were all aligned with this being a good opportunity for figuring out where we can add value to the conversation.

But the other side of it is that the messaging almost came to us in the sense that our customers came to us. For these solutions. These were the stories we were able to tell; these were the use cases. These are the case studies that we can talk about when we’re talking to prospects. Yes, there was the side of touchy things like this, I think you need buy-in because if it goes wrong, you don’t want it to be coming at a left field for people in the company, but at the same time. It very clearly revealed itself to us as a strong message that we could associate our brand with because we are already the solution for it. And then I think we have a unique perspective because we’re impacted by it as well. We’re not standing outside saying, Hey, do this. Life is so hard for you. We’re the solution. Like we’re living it, and we can also provide some support there. 

Jeff White: I have to think, too, that part of what you are fighting against is not just the notion of trying to get people to understand the appeal and the importance of 3D printing within the supply chain. But you’re also, within this environment, this uncertainty that we’re all dealing with. You’re trying to counter the resistance of people to actually move ahead with something and make a decision and do it now rather than wait and see how things are in a year or so. Say three and a half years. 

Carman Pirie: Or three and a half days. Or three and a half weeks. 

Jeff White: Yeah. It changes so fast. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. It’s easy to see how that would scare you into some level of paralysis, right? 

Alexandra Corey: Absolutely. That’s definitely a piece of it for sure. There is a lot of hesitancy on behalf of businesses everywhere to make major decisions that are gonna impact their production line because.

To your point, things are changing so quickly. When you look at setting up a local manufacturing facility, typically, like CNC, all of the costs associated with tooling like this can be multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can take weeks at a time to do. If a company invests in an Array, it starts at about 85 to 100K. Depending on what you’re looking to get with it. And you can be up and running in 48 hours or less. And the Mosaic team will work closely with our customers, not only to just show up and install a machine, but to actually understand the business and figure out where you’re gonna get the best ROI from your investment.

So if you’re already spending approximately this much on. Additional costs incurred by tariffs, and then you can invest in a solution. It de-risks that decision to an extent. The longer you wait, the worse that ROI is going to be for you. So if you can make a decision, if you can do it confidently, if you have somebody who’s gonna back you and help you get the most outta your investment, I think that has a lot of value. Compared to just waiting to see where the market’s gonna go, what the next decision’s gonna be.

Jeff White: It’s a compelling argument. 

Carman Pirie: It is. And I think the tariff situation may evolve. It may change, it may go away. What doesn’t go away, though, is supply chain volatility. Supply chain disruptions. We’ve seen it since the pandemic. We’ve seen it from ships being blocked in the Strait of Hormuz, all kinds of different things that can cause supply chain disruption. And it would seem to me that the messaging around supply chain resiliency, regardless of tariffs, would have to find some purchase.

Alexandra Corey: From climate change to your point, geopolitical, shipwreck in the Suez canal, labour strikes, those are becoming more and more common. So these are things that manufacturers have been dealing with for a long time. I think that the tariff just creates financial urgency now that you know it’s happening. You don’t necessarily know when the next hurricane’s gonna happen. It might not, but you know that your costs are tripling with FFFs, maybe more right now. So it’s just that urgency. But the problem is there, and it’s gonna continue to get worse, probably. 

Jeff White: It’s not particularly sunny.

Carman Pirie: We’re not here to try to make you feel good, Jeff. 

Jeff White: No, I know, 

Alexandra Corey: But the flip side to that is that while the problem’s getting worse, the technology’s getting better. We’re developing far better automation technology. We have things like additive manufacturing. We have the ability to open factories locally much more effectively than we could have before, thanks to this technology. Labour’s getting a lot more affordable as a result of it. The problem’s gonna be there for sure, but there are so many more opportunities to turn that into a solution each and every year. 

Carman Pirie: As we bring this show to a close, I must say, it’s been a really fascinating conversation. It’s been really interesting to understand more about what you and Mosaic are doing here. I wonder if you can give us a glimpse into how you’re thinking about the next 12 to 24 months. Any evolution that you’re imagining in this approach? Anything that you are keeping your eye on that is going to dramatically impact your strategy.

Alexandra Corey: From a product perspective, we’re really focused on reliability. So that’s not a dramatic change, we always have been, but a lot of time and investment has gone into making sure that the technology is incredibly reliable, incredibly easy and quick to deploy. Something that is impacting our strategy for the short term is just really looking at the defence industry in the United States. The defence industry is the single largest adopter of additive manufacturing across the world. They’re adopters of additive manufacturing. That hasn’t changed. What is important is individual countries’ commitment to their defence operations. And I think that’s gonna open a lot of new opportunities for us in that industry. And it’s really just manufacturing things that are focused on sovereignty and national welfare and so on. But there are a lot of places for our technology to plug into that world, and especially with our focus on industrial high-temperature applications. It makes a lot of sense for us, and the budgets are just going up. That’s definitely a place we have our eye on right now. 

Jeff White: Good time to be in that space. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, absolutely. Allie, thank you for sharing your experience with us today. Like I said, it’s been lovely to have you on the show. Really appreciate it.

Alexandra Corey: Thank you for having me. 

Jeff White: Fantastic. Thank you.