We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adam and Grace Druecke a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Adam and Grace, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

A few years back, we were camping with a group of friends. At one point, we pulled out our camp kitchen – which is now known as the Yoke Outdoors Chuck Box Camp Kitchen – and everyone immediately gushed over it. They all wanted one!

We’d had the product for about 20 years at that point. It was invented by two brothers who were no longer manufacturing it. Based on the feedback from our camping friends, we knew we had to get this product back to market.

After the trip, we immediately tracked down the original factory hoping they could still manufacture the camp kitchen. Miraculously, they still had the molds, and were excited to resurrect the product.

We rebranded it to the Chuck Box Camp Kitchen and launched. Because there was nothing else like it in the marketplace we knew it would sell well. Other options were fussy, or clunky, or didn’t have enough storage. Many people were simply using a basic plastic tote box to carry their camp kitchen supplies, which didn’t keep anything organized and inevitably always cracked after a couple camping trips.

Our box is designed to last forever. If a customer buys one, they’ll never have to buy one again.

Adam and Grace, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

This isn’t the first ecommerce business that Grace has run. She founded and ran a Turkish towel company for roughly five years before selling it in 2021. Grace worked in the retail industry – both online and at brick and mortar stores – for 10+ year after receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Retail. For his part, Adam has a background in logistics, and spent 7+ years working logistics for a national retailer. These skills have helped us manage the day-to-day operations of the business. This experience has also helped us see the cracks in the retail industry, like the rise of unsustainable trends such as fast fashion and planned obsolescence. It also opened our eyes to the need for truly quality products.
When it came time to launch the Chuck Box Camp Kitchen, it was important to us to keep the product exactly the same as the original one we were lucky enough to own. We wanted to keep the high quality standards the inventors had adopted for this product that was a labor of love.
Many companies reduce quality to reduce manufacturing costs, but we weren’t willing to do that. Many even reduce quality on purpose, using planned obsolescence, to create more demand for their product down the road. We wanted to make a product that would last forever. Not exactly a smart long-term business plan but it’s what was right for us and our values.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

2020 was a great year for us. People got into camping more than ever so the demand for our product was high. But by 2021 we started to run into crushing supply chain and labor issues. We were still taking orders, but had to let customers know we were on a months-long waitlist. Even with a long lead time we still were missing deadlines. Most were understanding, and we made sure to stay in regular contact with customers so they felt taken care of and understood the process, but we still had a lot of canceled orders and disappointed customers.

Each time we had a delay, I had to email every single customer to update them about their new estimated ship date. It’s never fun to send an email like that. It felt like our business wasn’t going to survive, so we had to make the tough decision to find a new manufacturer that could handle the increased demand and manage the supply chain issues. Otherwise, we knew we’d have to let the business die, and we really didn’t want to do that. We knew the product was popular. We just needed to make more of it!

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We’re proud to manufacture this product right here in the USA! We’ve worked with Midwest manufacturing companies, which we also enjoy, since we’re both from the Midwest.

During our first three years in business, we worked solely with the original Chuck Box Camp Kitchen manufacturer. It was a small facility and they couldn’t keep up with our order volume. The owner was also preparing to retire, so it was time for a change.

We use a special, high-quality, highly-durable manufacturing process called roto-molding – not many USA based manufacturers still use this process. So it took a significant amount of time and research to find a new manufacturer.

Thankfully, we were able to find the right fit with a manufacturer in a neighboring state. At first they were hesitant to work with us because, while we were growing, we were still a small company. But once they saw our product, they fell in love with it as so many people do! They came on board and it’s a solid partnership and has been a boon to our business. We’re off those waitlists that plagued us in 2021 and are able to get the product to the customer in record time.

Contact Info:

• Website: yokeoutdoors.com
• Instagram: @yokeoutdoors
• Other: @yokeoutdoors on TikTok

Image Credits
Taylor Hendrickson