Celebrating our 20th Birthday 

Schippers & Crew is proud to announce that 2010 marks our 20th year in business!

Our nation has survived a lot of things in the last two decades: Y2K, two Wars in Iraq, three Star Wars movies, and reality TV. The economy has morphed on multiple levels and still can’t be predicted. American manufacturing has been underbid by overseas competitors. But Schippers & Crew has survived for twenty years and we are bigger and stronger than before.

What’s our secret? We were fortunate to start our manufacturing business at a time when most assembly was done by hand and a huge up front investment in equipment wasn’t required. We were able to build step-by-step and over the years we’ve added machines to keep up with advancing technology. Although we always had dreams of “making it big” and landing huge contracts that would guarantee long-term business we could see the writing on the wall. After 9/11 in 2001, the face of US manufacturing changed permanently as outsourcing became the new trend. The ensuing layoffs could be blamed on the hurting economy. Our larger competitors closed their doors or moved overseas. We settled down in our niche of small- to medium-size work with a high standard of quality. We picked up business from our closed competitors and have kept busy ever since.

The Crew
A huge factor in our success has been our incredible Crew. We can’t begin to thank them for the hard work and dedication they’ve contributed over the past twenty years. We have fourteen crew members who are near or past the ten-year mark and four of them have been with us for fifteen years or more. We’ve had crew members graduate college and move up or move on. We’ve been through a lot of babies. The first one graduates high school this year. An original Crew member, Lynne’s son, Danar Hoverson, moved back to Seattle in October and is back on the team. His wife, Ximena, joins us in the office.

Although electronics assembly has become more automated over the last twenty years, it still takes immense expertise to ensure a quality product. The level of talent required for manual assembly has increased exponentially as components shrink to virtual invisibility. We are very fortunate to have our talented crew.

Schippers & Crew Adds New Pick & Place Equipment! 

Speaking of continuous improvement, we are proud to announce the addition of two new Pick & Place machines to our production line-up!  These are high-speed units, one is configured primarily as a chip shooter and the other as a flexible unit, together in the same line.  The chip shooter can place 0201s and together they add additional capacity to our production floor. They were installed in February and after several weeks of training we are happy to be up and running.  So far we are very pleased with the production results.  Of course we’ll be showing these off during our Open House, but feel free to come by and see them anytime!