Oso Electric Equipment, a commercial electric lawn mower manufacturer, has announced a strategic partnership with WCS Distributing, a distributor and supplier of landscape products. The collaboration is set to redefine Oso’s market reach with a significant expansion beyond the company’s current market presence in California and Texas.
WCS extensive network includes over 350 dealers across multiple states, such as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Hawaii. This strategic alliance allows WCS to offer Oso’s electric lawn mowers to this vast network of dealers, making the mowers available to a broader customer base.
The Oso 21-Inch Commercial Electric Lawn Mower, a smart mower with 4G LTE connectivity, not only rivals gas mowers but also incorporates GPS tracking for enhanced route efficiency, empowering you to optimize your crew’s productivity.
WCS is set to house the units, along with comprehensive parts support, at their expansive 32,800 sq ft facility in San Bernardino, CA. Steve Sykes, owner of WCS, stated his intention to grow the Oso brand in a similar manner as WCS grew the Snapper, Gravely, and Ariens brands over the past years. According to Sykes, “The Oso electric mower is the best investment any landscaper can make. The return on investment is less than one year compared to a gas-powered mower.”
Oso Road Show
To kick off the collaboration, the WCS Team and Oso Team will embark on a Roadshow in the first quarter of 2024. The initiative involves visiting all partnered dealers, presenting live demonstrations, and showcasing the features of Oso’s flagship mower. Attendees will have the chance to engage with experts from both WCS and Oso, gaining insights into the benefits and functionalities of Oso mowers.
Commenting on the partnership, Alejandro Dominguez, VP of Sales at Oso, expressed enthusiasm about the collaboration, stating, “This partnership with WCS marks a significant milestone for Oso. We’re thrilled to join forces with WCS, leveraging their robust distribution network to introduce our innovative products to a wider audience.”
Background
From Oso: Oso Electric Equipment was established 2 years ago with a simple mission: Electrify Your World. As part of that mission, we focused our aim on electrifying small to medium-sized gasoline engines in various industries. We chose the landscape industry first due to its high impact on greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants emitted by commercial landscaping equipment. After working with local landscapers to understand the state of battery-powered commercial-grade landscaping equipment in the industry, it quickly became clear that we could also solve another major problem – Put simply, the existing battery-powered commercial landscaping equipment was terrible. We knew we could do better. We decided to tackle the 21-inch walk behind mower due to its widespread use all over the country.
The Oso 21-Inch Commercial Electric Lawn Mower is a 4G LTE connected smart mower that can go head-to-head against the best gas mowers in the market today. In only the short amount of time we have been selling our equipment, we have struggled to keep up with production capacity due to its popularity. Oso customers love our mower because of its ease of use, comparable performance to gas-powered equipment, minimum maintenance, fuel expense savings, and its superior build quality. I do want to personally thank the California Clean Off-Road Equipment Voucher Incentive Project (CORE) for their generous rebate program, which helped Oso tremendously in the early days in convincing customers to try our mower.
Oso Electric Equipment has fully embraced the business principle of the Circular Economy, which simply means we will build our product with high-quality, long-lasting materials with a well-defined end-of-life plan to either refurbish or recycle the product to lower its lifetime emissions impact. To that end, we are willing to buy back our product from our customers. I encourage you to visit osoelectric.com or speak with one of our sales executives for more details on the warranty and buyback program.
We made the Oso mower with ‘smart’ and ‘connected’ features because we wanted to collect detailed product usage information so we could better understand the size of battery, blade performance requirement, and the daily runtime needs of our users. Thanks to our usage data, we can confidently tell you that Oso’s 2-hour battery runtime was a good decision. We recommend our customers buy two batteries for a total of 4 hours of runtime per day. Based on our data, more than 90% of our mowers are used for less than 4 hours of actual cut time, despite being out in the field for a full workday. We have only a single digit percentage of users who regularly use their mowers for more than 4 hours per day. We also learned that our blade and self-drive system is powerful and well-tuned compared to gas mowers, with minimal complaints about the overall performance of the mower.
As part of our mission, we estimated the avoided Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by using Oso mowers instead of gasoline-powered mowers. These emissions primarily include CO2, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide. Our calculations are based on information from CARB and the EPA for a small off-road vehicle engine. Based on this, we estimated that Oso mowers have avoided about 1,500 metric tons of GHG emissions in 2023.
In 2024: look for the Oso Plug2Go™ a power bank for on-the-road charging of all your handheld devices. Plug2Go is a Power Bank + Oso 3-Battery Charger, all in one. Since the batteries are external, you can share the batteries between the mower and the power bank. However, we recommend that you get dedicated batteries for the power bank. With a 120V/20A output, 4.8KWh/100Ah capacity, Plug2Go can cover almost all of the mobile charging needs of landscapers. Plug2Go will be available as an add-in product beginning in Q2 2024.
For related articles, read:
Federal Tax Credit For Zero-Emission Commercial Landscape Equipment Introduced
Gas Vs. Electric OPE: Real World Costs
Creating Charging Infrastructure For OPE