Founded in 2019, Phatfour is a young company that builds its own electric fat bikes. It started off as three friends in a shed, designing and welding the bikes together. From there, they almost literally started selling the bikes on the street and quickly grew. To keep up with this growth, Phatfour began looking for suppliers. During this search they came across Promatrix, which offered them an appealing collaboration.

“In our search for a partner, it was important for us to work with a Dutch company. We wanted to be able to save on transport and keep our CO₂ emissions low, especially for volume products that take up a lot of space,” says Mels van Hoolwerff, CEO of Phatfour. “We also wanted to see if we could replace our previous aluminium fenders with plastic products.”

Better business case

“Last year we hired a designer who had a lot of experience in making moulds and knew a number of players in the Netherlands. He mentioned that Promatrix made aluminium moulds. To us, that sounded like a better business case than if they were made of steel. Of course, we put our request to multiple companies. We approached Asian producers and looked at other Dutch companies for steel moulds. Promatrix is a company we immediately believed in and which also made us a competitive offer.”

Attractive proposal

“We contacted Promatrix through the website and that got the ball rolling. The process started with a calculation example about unit prices and investments that exactly matched our company’s size and volumes. An attractive proposal that made us think, ‘let’s just do it’.”

Easy to get started

“When developing new parts, we always have them 3D printed first to test both design and strength. After this process was completed, Promatrix made the moulds. The combination of mould making and injection moulding makes it easy to get started. Otherwise, you first have to look for a company that makes moulds and then comes the question of whether the moulds are a good fit for the manufacturer to be able to start production. That’s a bigger challenge than when everything is under one roof. It’s also very handy that you get a total price upfront and can easily start calculating costs.”

A lot of knowledge

“We enjoy a good collaboration. We’ve noticed you have a lot of knowledge, so that’s really cool. In the meantime you moved, which sometimes made it a bit harder to get in touch with you. That just goes with the territory, even if it was less desirable. Fortunately, this hardly interfered with the result. In practice, you always encounter things that turned out differently than expected. This required us to change the design slightly and adjust the moulds. Of course, this involves additional costs, but I think that was resolved very neatly. All in all, a great collaboration.”