Reekon’s gadgets aren’t budget-friendly — up to $260 —but the startup says that since its launch five years ago it has sold over 100,000 of them, to companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, office furniture maker Steelcase, and Schneider Electric.
Reed is a former US Army Reserve engineer with a degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During much of his eight years in the service, he was based in Kuwait, overseeing the construction of military bases throughout the Middle East. While stateside, he worked at Somerville 3D printing company Formlabs.
In 2020, Reed and his Formlabs colleague Kostas Oikonomopoulos launched Reekon using money raised through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. “We really went into it as a side project,” said Reed. “Let’s launch it. Maybe it’d be a cool way to increase our skills.”
The fundraiser was a stunning success. For their initial product, a digital guide for miter saws, they hoped to raise $10,000 through pre-orders. Instead, they took in $1.2 million. In total, the company’s various products have attracted over $3.7 million in Kickstarter funding.
It’s this money, along with revenue from sales, that powers Reekon. “It’s essentially an interest-free loan,” said Reed. The company hasn’t sought a dime from venture investors, ensuring that the founders are in control of their company.
For Reed, it’s all about dragging the construction trades into the 21st century.
“Productivity has stagnated in construction for the past two-plus decades,” he said. And one reason is as old as the pyramids: measurement errors.
Say a contractor is installing new windows. First come the measurements, usually done in the old analog fashion. “Someone comes in with their tape measure,” said Reed. “They take one measurement, counting the lines, pause, take out their pencil, write it down on a piece of paper.”
And so on. Once all the data is written down, the worker calls it in or types it into a computer. But a worker might misread the tape, or misremember the data, or type it incorrectly. The result is a new window that doesn’t fit.
Reekon’s $120 Utility tape measure, and its costlier big brother, the $260 Tomahawk, display the exact length of each measurement on a digital screen, and store the data in an on-board memory.
The Tomahawk version includes a side-mounted screen displaying a list of multiple measurements, as well as a green laser that fires a dead-straight beam of green light from either side of the ruler. This helps ensure that the device is perfectly straight before taking the measurement.
Both tape measures can transmit their readings to an app that stores them on a iPad or mobile. And from there, the data can be relayed to an on-site worker who can start cutting the right-sized pieces on a miter saw.
Reekon’s original product, the Caliber, attaches to the saw. It uses a spring-loaded rubber wheel that measures the length of anything that is slid beneath it. And its digital memory is loaded with all the measurements taken by the tape measure.
A worker pushes a piece of wood or metal under the Caliber and makes the cut when the device displays the correct length. The Caliber is accurate to 1/32nd of an inch. (It even compensates for the millimeter or so of material that’s lost to the saw blade.)
Reekon’s tools are available to do-it-yourselfers through The Home Depot, but most customers are professionals like Josh Nieves, who does workforce development and communications for Miller Electric in Tampa, Florida.
“This is a tremendous tool,“ said Nieves, who often works with electrician apprentices straight out of high school. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know how to use tape measures.” Nieves said that his company gives Reekon tape measures as gifts to apprentices who graduate from the program.
Reed plans to keep on innovating. Next up is a hybrid tape measure. It combines a 16-foot steel tape with a front-firing laser that can measure distances of up to 165 feet, as well as a gyroscopic level to make sure the ruler is absolutely flat. The company raised $313,000 in Kickstarter pre-orders for the new device so far.
And Reed is on the lookout for still more opportunities to smarten up construction tools. “I think there are probably many opportunities in construction,” he said. “It’s a very underserved space.”
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.
About the Author
