11 June, 2021

Behind the scenes - Greased Lightning production

For today’s blog post we’re sharing a little bit about what it’s like behind the scenes here at Greased Lightning. We’re starting with the Medsa Group warehouse, where production and distribution take place.

A Typical Day

The day starts early at Greased Lightning and the first job is to download and print all of the web and consumer orders for despatch that have come in overnight. At busy times we can have over 300 orders waiting for us to work-on. When this happens we double up the order team to ensure that orders are ready for collection in the early afternoon.

• Inside our well organised warehouse

Once the consumer orders are complete the team will split up to their allocated jobs for the day. This could entail:

• picking trade orders
• blending new product batches
• bottling product
• packing display packs.

In amongst all of that we will have supplier deliveries to receive and check and outgoing trucks to load. As the day draws to an end the work areas are cleaned down ready for the next day.

In the background we will be working on formulating and testing new products and checking our stock levels to ensure we can meet expected orders.

• Product stocktaking

Product Development and Product Testing

At Greased Lightning we put a significant amount of time and effort into developing and testing products. We approach the introduction of new products from two aspects.

1. What do our customers want, what would they like to see in our range?
2. Secondly, we talk regularly with our scientific advisors, to understand what technology is available in the supply chain that we can use to make high performance and easy to use products.

We then move on to designing the formulation for the target product, testing each version along the way, measuring its’ performance against the desired outcome but also the experience of using the product. We can go through a huge number of iterations of a formula before we are happy.

How do we test?

The test areas in our lab can resemble a car parts store – body panels, car seats, wheels, tyres and trim are all used as test beds for our products. We also have measuring equipment that can empirically measure the performance of our products.

As we get closer to the final version we test on our own cars, the new ones and the older ones, to ensure the products deliver great results. At the same time  the we will be running stability testing under varying climatic conditions. Finally, we test the compatibility of any new product with our existing products and with our packaging.

The development process can take up to 12 months until we are happy and, in some cases, has taken over two years.

What products would you like to see us develop? Let us know in the comments or on our social media channels.