Right 2 Repair...
If you've ever wrenched on your own stuff or repaired a washer, appliance or piece of electronics you know how frustrating it can be. It's like the manufacturer purposefully made it difficult or impossible to fix and that after all is the point: take it in to the dealer or buy a new one. But it doesn't have to be that way. Soulr's trees can be repaired by an average person with standard tools, DIY knowledge and a bit of elbow grease and perseverance. All of the parts are either off-the-shelf, available on-line at stores like (but not limited to) Amazon, McMaster or Alibaba or can be fabbed. We endeavor to make our designs available on-line (soon), both hardware and software, so that you and a community of users can keep your trees in tip top shape for decades. We think they can go 100 years plus with some TLC and regular maintenance.
Circular Economy...
We believe the concepts of the circular economy are essential if humanity is to move forward in a sustainable way. One way we've interpreted that is to eschew the use of plastic in our products. It would not be inaccurate to say we HATE plastic. Having said that, we have a couple parts that are plastic (which we hope to eventually eliminate) and of course, we have no control over the components that go into and on the tree but we feel good that we're 99.99% plastic free by volume - everything else can generally be recycled.
Equipment Agnostic & Future Proof
We want our trees to be compatible with as large a set of commercial components as possible to give you flexibility in how you configure your tree. It's all about choice and in my thinking; freedom is choice. Choice in cost, choice in country of origin for components, choice in values. This may not seem like a big deal now but in the future many of those component manufacturers will be belly-up or perhaps a trade war will preclude a ready supply and then what? If you work with everything then everything works with you.
Non-human Rights & Species Royalty...
Climate-change is tightly coupled to biodiversity loss is tightly coupled to deforestation is tightly coupled to ocean degradation is tightly coupled to human overpopulation: they all affect each other and these aren't tidy little individual problems that can be solved independent of each other as our politicians would have us believe. Therefore I support non-human rights (for those sentient beings we share the planet with), the concept of species royalty and measures to reduce human overpopulation. Our goal is to make money - so we can give it away.
VC Money...
VC for some people means Venture Capital. For others, Vulture Capital. Long story short: When you take other folk's money, there is a cost to be paid and that's when you start working for them... and the first thing to go are your values and your vision. We've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs and engineers about this and the vast majority are wary when it comes to VC money. We're sure there are exceptions...we just haven't met any (yet).