#127 - Retro Regulator™ with Praxxis CEO Kevin Miller
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In this episode, Andy interviews Kevin Miller, CEO, Praxxis Manufacturing. Company Website: https://www.h2owize.com/ YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/CZfaKbiE-Tg   ----------------------- Joining me today is Kevin Miller, the CEO and co founder of Praxis. The manufacturers of the retro pressure regulator and other water conservation products earlier in his career. Kevin co founded, built and led three companies that generated substantial revenue in the hundreds of millions. Alongside this, he made strategic investments and joined Goldstur. A pioneering bootstrap startup that developed an automated retail kiosk for the analysis and appraisal of precious metal jewelry. Currently, Kevin serves as the co founder and CEO of Praxis, a company renowned for its creation of H2O Wise water conservation products specifically designed for the landscape industry. Kevin, welcome to the show.  Thanks for having me this morning.  I am really excited to talk to you because I think you've got some hidden gems of products that I'm sure a lot of listeners aren't familiar with yet, but I think they will become familiar with your products over time. And sometimes it's harder to be an incumbent in this industry when there's a couple big brands that tend to own a lot of the shelf space. So really look forward to learning about your innovations and perhaps some of your go to market strategy and such.  Absolutely. Let me just get started by giving you a little more background on the company and myself. I've always been involved in the manufacturing space and right out of college, I went to work for a Pentair, a big manufacturer of pumps, filters, and heaters, and got involved in product development. And if there's one thing that I truly love is just that, developing products. Working on hard, complicated solutions to everyday problems. It may not be a super sexy thing, like irrigation or pool equipment. But with Praxis, we've been able to develop a couple of unique patented products that save water, save money, and also divert plastic waste from our landfills. And the Retro Regulator is one such product. And this came about at the height of the pandemic. We had just launched the H2OWISE brand in 2019 at the Las Vegas IA show and the world shut down. It was a unique experience going through that. And we continued working, we had a a product that had been we tested the concept, worked great. And California was just going to mandated PRS. And when you look at the amount of sprinklers that are in the ground, just in the state of California, there are over 450 million that have zero pressure regulation in them for the most part. And when you extrapolate that through the entire United States, that number quickly rose as you can imagine. We wanted to offer a solution that was easy for the pro contractor and also for a homeowner to be able to retrofit a product. Into an existing sprinkler already in the ground. There was born retro regulator. Several iterations. What was can I ask you, was this the first product that Praxis developed? No. Which was first? So our water irrigation ring was the first product that we developed. And Praxis started as a OEM manufacturing company. So we do custom injection molding and custom design work for other large OEMs. Not just in the irrigation space, but also in the pool and spa industry. So WaterWell was the first H2O wise branded product that we launched into the market in 2019. Okay. And when you say OEM, does that also like contract work? Let's say I've got a new widget that I want to make. Could I contact you to manufacture it? Exactly. Yes. You never know, I might be contacting you someday. Yeah, give us a call. Okay, so you started with the water well, and from what I understand, that's like a drip ring? Yeah, it's an irrigation ring. It's designed to go around new and relatively new trees that are planted either on slopes, on parkways, and it includes a five GPH drip emitters and a non erodin
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