How it all began…
Today marks FOUR YEARS since the founding of PVpallet. In light of this special day, CEO Philip Schwarz shared a bit about the genesis of PVpallet and our solar panel pallet, Series X.
Today marks FOUR YEARS since the founding of PVpallet. In light of this special day, I wanted to share a bit about the genesis of our flagship Series X pallet, a game-changing solution for managing solar modules. In 2019, PVpallet was just a crazy “back of the napkin” idea that was presented to me by my co-founder Luke Phelps. When he first showed me the sketch, he didn’t tell me what it was. He asked me what I THOUGHT it was. “Umm…a portable racking system for solar panels?” Nope. It’s a PALLET. Luke explained that he was trying to develop more than just a simple pallet. This pallet would be reusable, made of recycled materials, collapsible, and adjustable. He wanted to solve all of the waste problems: broken solar panels, safety issues, warehouse and shipping inefficiencies, recurring wood pallet costs, disposal fees, etc. It was a bold mission. But once he explained it, I quickly extrapolated the issues to the utility-scale side of the industry, where we’re not just shipping tens of pallets to a job site like Luke’s installation business at the time, but tens of THOUSANDS of pallets. Frankly, I couldn’t believe that no one had tried to solve this massive issue yet.
We spent months kicking around design ideas, rendering concepts, 3D printing small, functional models. We had some really great ideas (and some flat out terrible ideas). Such is the design process. At one point, when we thought we were close to a final design, we realized it was far too complex and would cost a fortune to manufacture. So that day, which I will never forget, we literally started over from scratch—a blank whiteboard. But that restart, where we were now uninhibited by the bumpers of existing ideas, ultimately fast-tracked us to a final design that we loved.
We made a full-scale prototype made of wood and presented it to our fantastic mold builders in Iowa: MSI Mold Builders. Our design still had manufacturing challenges and needed more optimization to make the final product—and they proved to be a perfect partner. We were told “that won’t work” many times, but that didn’t stop us. We took the feedback, pivoted, and pushed forward. And that mentality is now engrained in our nature as a company. Our team pulls on strings to see what unravels. If that string is taut, we move to the next one. It is challenging, exciting, at times incredibly frustrating, but ultimately incredibly rewarding knowing that we are driving positive change.
Series X turned into a product that our customers love. It fulfills our mission of waste reduction. We have sold to over 130 companies in the solar industry with overwhelmingly positive feedback. Our PVpallet team is making the solar industry more sustainable, efficient, safer, and saving installers money in the process. And we are just getting started!
—Philip Schwarz, Co-founder and CEO
