Constant Innovation: What We're Doing to Serve Our Customers

The first blog in this series highlighted our beginnings as repair shop owners and how that led to the idea of Mobile Defenders. It’s these early days that shaped the way we approach Mobile Defenders on a daily basis, because we’ve been in the trenches and understand the inner workings of a repair shop. In this blog, we'll take a look at who Mobile Defenders is in the present day and how each and every decision we make is with our customers in mind!

We’re a team committed to high standards

In 2017, we took a hard look at our product line in order to assess what we could do to improve.

“We weren’t happy with the quality of parts we were seeing on the open market,” says Urian Cofer, Product Quality Manager here at Mobile Defenders, “they were way off the mark compared to OEM parts.”

We began to wonder if we’d be able to create our own parts that could meet the standards our customers deserved. With this in mind, our normal trips to China started to look different as we began to meet with a number of manufacturers in order to find a good fit. Once we found partners we felt confident working with, we began the process of what would become our SELECT series.

“It didn’t happen overnight,” Cofer adds, “it was a lot of back and forth between our team and theirs. We would receive samples from the factory, test them, give feedback, then start over again. We would repeat the process until we landed on a product that was as close to OEM as we could.”

As our presence in China grew with the introduction of the SELECT line, it offered the opportunity for us to open our first office in China. This team was built to work closely with manufacturing partners to quality control the parts prior to shipment. While small at first, our office in China is growing in order to make quality control efforts overseas even better.

Our strive for quality doesn’t end in China though. Here at home, in Grand Rapids, MI, we’ve secured a number of certifications to ensure that we are operating at the highest level for our customers.

Our ISO 9001:2015 certification proves that our processes follow standard work so we can add repeatability to what we do daily. This ensures that you know, without a doubt, that we’re taking active steps to ensure that what we do for you is done in the most efficient way to meet demands.

Our UN 38.3 certification on lithium ion batteries was secured in order to transport batteries by air, sea, or road compliantly. Due to the risk of dangerous goods, through this certification, we ensure that our batteries have went through rigorous tests and are packaged in accordance with regulations. Our top priority is safety and quick transport to provide our customers with the parts they need.

Lastly, our CTPAT certification demonstrates the security of our supply chain against unauthorized entries into the United States. CTPAT focuses on minimum security criteria for the entire supply chain from production to outbound shipments. Cargo needs to be secured from tampering at all stages of the process. This ensures that only the goods that are requested for import are the products that arrive. This certification helped develop both our internal processes around supplier vetting and understanding the ESG of China and how it relates to our supply chain. It has also provided control of the import process to reduce the risk of unauthorized goods.

We’re willing to innovate

In 2017, we had a small operation for Chromebook parts. But it was one of our sales managers, Cole Manning, that started to see a bigger opportunity.

“Once I noticed the larger market for Chromebook parts, I put together a proposal and presented it to the leadership team,” says Manning.

This marked the beginning of eduPARTS, a company powered by Mobile Defenders, that offers reliable, high-quality Chromebook and iPad replacement parts for schools and other government agencies. Our goal is to provide the most effective and consistent service in the industry. In the beginning, Manning ran the entire operation on his own, but eduPARTS has seen incredible growth since its inception, leading to a need for a larger support team, which has now grown to eighteen employees.

With the introduction of SELECT and the overall growth of the industry, it became apparent that we couldn’t sustain both Mobile Defenders as well as Genius Phone Repair. This sadly led to the decision to ultimately sell Genius to focus our efforts on Mobile Defenders.

“I’m proud of our team,” says Jordan Notenbaum, the founder of both Genius and Mobile Defenders, “their ability to grow from more grassroots beginnings to where we are now is amazing.”

We’re growing our partnerships

The past few years have meant a huge focus on OEM partnerships. This has been fueled by a desire to continue to push the boundaries of quality. We’ve been fortunate to gain partnerships with Motorola, LG, OnePlus, HP, and Lenovo.

These partnerships help us to supply the best possible parts to our customers, straight from the source. From Mobile Defenders' inception, this has been the goal: to make it easy for repair shops to be successful with high quality parts for high quality repairs.

This focus has expanded our catalog and made it clear that we needed more space. We are set to break ground on a new building to accommodate and grow our OEM partnerships, product offering, and continue to create processes to ensure a streamlined, hassle-free experience for our customers.

These partnerships and the new building are only part of our goals as we move forward. Everything we do stems from our passion to better serve our customers and we look forward to continuously innovating for you!