We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mary Ellen Kramer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mary Ellen below.

Mary Ellen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

NightRide’s mission is to keep people everywhere safe when driving at night or in low light conditions. When we say people, we mean every day drivers as well as professionals. NightRide has developed itself as the leader in vehicle mounted thermal cameras. The thermal camera niche has historically been served by a few big corporations who have designed their solutions for new luxury cars. The high cost of the vehicles plus the camera add-on has made it prohibitive for the average person to own this life saving device.

NightRide has designed its suite of products with a focus on the aftermarket. Each model can be easily and quickly installed by the driver and many models can be moved from one vehicle to another. This means that this important safety device can be shared by more than one driver.

We serve many federal, state and local public safety agencies as well as private security companies throughout the country and around the world. The camera makes a huge difference in keeping first responders and residents safe, including search and rescue efforts for small children and seniors. With NightRide, agencies have the ability to acquire cameras that fit their use case and their budget.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

A little background. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. I still live in Brooklyn with my husband who is also a co-founder of NightRide. Together we have 8 children and 8 grandchildren who live all over the world. I have been a serial high tech entrepreneur since 1985. I have founded companies that created banking and trading systems, international telecommunications networks, satellite antennas for maritime communications and finally, NightRide Thermal in 2018.

My co-founders and I believe that life-saving thermal vision should be accessible to everyone, not just professionals. Our products reveal obstacles typically hidden from a driver’s view, enabling vision well beyond headlights. NightRide thermal cameras let you spot people, animals, black ice and other hazards — no matter the time of day or the weather conditions.

NightRide’s design ethos is its winning formula. The team believes the best products come from real-world needs, so they’ve spent thousands of hours with actual users in the field, getting feedback on what works and what doesn’t. NightRide listens to its customers — creating a loyal and passionate user base that has created an overwhelming demand for its products by word of mouth.

The company has grown quickly due to demand from new markets – NightRide now serves hunting and sporting, farming and ranching, wildlife preservation, off-roading, public safety, emergency management, campus and industrial security, commercial transportation, and more through a network of more than 150 dealers around the world.

NightRide is a woman-owned business and we proudly manufacture our cameras in the United States.

The NightRide team is the Company’s key to success. The team members came together already having developed ground breaking products and systems in satellite communications, radar, direction finding, automotive lighting and telecommunications. Each person owns the mission and vision of NightRide and demonstrates it daily in their commitment to innovation and excellence.

I am most proud of the NightRide community we have created – team members, friends and family, investors, customers, dealers, and vendors, We have over 150 shareholders who come from every one of these stakeholder groups. We are so inspired by their enthusiastic and unwavering support!

Have you ever had to pivot?

In March of 2020 when the pandemic hit, NightRide had just released its first thermal camera into the market after 2 years of development. The key component in a thermal camera is a micro-bolometer – a collection of temperature sensors, which, through image processing, create a visual display of the heat signature of everything in its path. We call that a thermal image.

As the pandemic began to spread wildly, some of the best scientific minds in the world focused on creating human temperature measurement devices that could measure the temperature of hundreds of people who might be entering a train station, airport, factory, hospital, etc. Critical components like the micro-bolometer which we needed to manufacture our cameras were suddenly completely unavailable. The founders met together – it was clear we had to pivot.

We looked at what was most needed in the world at the time, and that was PPE – personal protective equipment. So, we declared that we were supplying PPE and started to reach out to potential suppliers and customers. The market needed this life saving equipment and we were one of the first companies to provide it. In the end, we served more than 20 nursing homes and clinics and brought in enough revenue to support our employees and operation until the fall of 2020 when we resumed our regular business!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We manufacture NightRide cameras at our location in Brooklyn, New York. When we got started, our engineering team was clear about how the camera needed to work, but not so clear about how to build the cameras and scale production. And, we had heard and read that, in hardware, the leap from making one or more prototype units to going into full production is often termed “The Valley of Death”. In other words, many companies do not survive past prototyping or small production runs.

Fortunately, we applied and were accepted to a 9 month program called Futureworks, sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation, which focused on supporting select hardware companies through prototyping and creating a plan for manufacturability. We learned about the importance of defining a Minimum Viable Product, and getting that out to market as fast as possible to get feedback from real users.

The Futureworks training has been invaluable to us – we not only avoided the Valley of Death, our production team can now handle making hundreds of cameras a month!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://getnightride.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nightridethermal/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Get.NightRide.Thermal
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryellenkramer/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nightrideusa4892