Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Here we are again, expecting Santa Klaus to come.
Is there anything cuter than a child’s wondered smile discovering a JIOrings’ seals box?!
All our best wishes for Xmas and 2016.
We bid 2015 farewell, pleased with how things went and grateful to all our customers and suppliers
This year we posted a monthly turnover record, among other achievements we’d like to share with you.
As 2015 winds to an end, it´s time to look back at where we’ve been, see if progress has been made in the right direction, analyze our missteps and, above all, reflect and try to learn from both the good and the bad.
As we reflect on the last twelve months we realize that there have been many more good things than bad ones, and that 2015 was a great year for JIOrings.
Through our daily efforts we achieved some important milestones that we’d like to share with you in this post. We are proud of all the progress that we made, a source of satisfaction infusing us with newfound energy and inspiring us to persevere in our main mission: offering the quickest way to find a seal.
ARKAITZ AND SILBIA, ON THE TEAM
Joining our team this year were Arkaitz Gojenola, our Sales Director and JIOrings’ most “visible face,” and Silbia González, our Marketing and Communications Director. It is no coincidence that Arkaitz and Silbia are first among the 2015 highlights we’re going to share with you. At JIOrings we assign great importance to our human resources. Without skilled and, above all, motivated people working with us, nothing would be the same, and we wouldn’t be where we are. Our thanks to everyone, in advance.
NEW PRODUCTS, A COMMITMENT TO DIGITAL MARKETING, AND A NEW WEBSITE
In 2015 we also bolstered the marketing of certain new products, such as silicone plugs for wooden barrels, adjustable to the different diameters of the bungholes used. We have also begun selling our seals to individual buyers through the Amazon platform.
In the latter endeavor and others related to online marketing we are being assisted by the digital consultancy firm Weroi. With their help we have come to appreciate how the Internet offers our company attractive business opportunities, which spurred us to revamp our website, improving usability so that visiting our “virtual home” and placing orders is much simpler for our customers and new users.
INTERNATIONALIZATION AND RECORD SALES
We want to keep growing, improve every day, and serve more and more customers around the world, which led us to recently participate in the Intergune Fair in Bilbao, a forum exposing Basque companies to the whole range of internationalization services. We examined these interesting opportunities and talked with the SPRI (Basque Business Development Agency) in different countries to find out first-hand about our market’s dynamics in them in order to evaluate potential business dealings in the future.
Thanks to all this (well, in addition to other things I don’t want to bore you with, but which are just as essential, like our daily efforts and determination), in April we posted a monthly billing record. It didn’t last long, however, as in September we beat it.
VIP SEATING AT THE SAN MAMÉS STADIUM FOR OUR CUSTOMERS
Things are going well for us, and the first thing we thought about was to how share that success with our customers and suppliers. We are well aware that without them and their trust JIOrings would not exist. We often say “thanks,” but we wanted to go a step further, so we came up with the idea of reserving VIP seats at San Mamés to invite them to enjoy a unique and unforgettable experience (culinary too) while forging ties and getting to know each other a little better.
JIOrings is the quickest way to find a seal, and our goal for 2016 is for that to continue to be true. With our work, and your help, it will.
JIOrings, selling O-Rings and giving away solidarity
We participate in the Babyloan project, which helps small entrepreneurs all over the world with zero-interest loans.
We deal in seals (O-Rings, Static Seals, Rotary Seals, Hygienic Seals, Axial Seals, etc.). You won’t find a quicker way to get them. That’s our business area. However, we believe that a company should have other things as well. What things you ask? We call them principles, or world vision and the commitment to try and improve it. And, in our “vision”, solidarity occupies a preeminent place.
That’s why we get involved several projects, in a totally unselfish way. One of them is Babyloan, the supportive loan. It consists in lending a small amount of money to a small entrepreneur in any part of the world, so they get a chance to implement their project. The borrower can be chosen by country, industry, type of business…
You can also choose how much to lend. And, once the project has recovered the investment, the money is reimbursed to the lender, who can choose between getting it back and lending it again to another small entrepreneur. In the last three years, we have been involved in nine projects (three per year), and every single one has achieved 100% recovery of the lent amount. We’ll tell you about a few of them:
When we decided to help Amna, she was 41, married and a mother of eight. All of them shared a three-bedroom house in the refugee camp in Jabalia, a Palestinian city located just a few kilometers north of Gaza. Her husband didn’t have a job, and the family’s only income came from a clothes-and-cosmetics store, which Amna herself ran. She was in bad need of help, like a micro-loan, to be able to buy more clothes and cosmetics from her suppliers in Gaza and Rafah, in order to generate more income. Her dream was to move to a bigger house, and to be able to afford proper education for her children.
Another married woman, Siv, was 40 and a mother of two. Her husband was a farmer, and she had been selling fruit in Cambodia for the last 20 years. But she needed money to buy more fruit to sell: Mangos, oranges, bananas and apples. Her goal was to improve her family’s living standards.
Kanninhesso was also married, 34 and had four children. She bought and sold Corn and Soy, goods in high demand in Benin (Africa), and often scarce, too. She needed the money to buy and sell more, in order to improve her children’s life standards. JIOrings has spear-headed this help project, and that makes us very proud.
Visit the Babyloan site and take a look at the projects. You’ll be amazed to see how much can be accomplished with so little.
Or contact us if you think we can help you with anything.
The X-Ring or the clover seal
The difference from the O-ring with its four lips or support points making its performance improve slightly.
The queen of static seals is the O-ring, undoubtedly the most universal seal, used in virtually all industrial sectors and even in others as surprising as jewellery (here as an ornamental element). However, we are going to dedicate this post to its “sister”, the quad-ring, also known as the X-ring or clover seal, a four-leaf clover.
It is these four sheets, these four flexible support points, the major difference from the O-ring and also its main advantage as thanks to them the quad-ring improves its performance slightly. For example, it affords greater pressure resistance and a reduction in friction and less wear and tear. It doesn’t matter what the direction of the force is, radial or axial, its sealing is guaranteed.
This all makes X-rings ideal in any application – alternative, rotary or static – in which there is a fluid with pressure, both for single and dual effect. In other words, almost all hydraulic or pneumatic applications. In our catalogue you will find all the technical information you require. And if you have any queries or need any explanation or advice, please feel free to get in touch with us.
As regards one of its names, clover seal, and as a curious fact: did you know that it is estimated that in nature there are around 10,000 three-leaf clovers for each four-leaf one? If you find a four-leaf clover, you should know that you have a little gem: legend has it that whoever wears one will be accompanied by good luck. The other three leaves represent the other components of happiness: health, lover and prosperity. Here at JIOrings we think that if you’ve no four-leaf clovers, quad-rings or x-rings are just as good.
If you wish to place an order, we guarantee 24-hour delivery if you are in the Iberian peninsula. We are the quickest way to find a seal. And if this seal is a quad-ring, we hope to bring you lots of luck.
This is how JIOrings, much more than an O-Ring Store, started
Our company stems from the determination of three friends: Jean Albert, Iñigo and Oscar, to give free rein to their ideas and to things their own way.
We’re the quickest way to find a seal: That is, an O-Ring, a Quad-Ring, Cord-Ring, V-Rings, U-Ring… This is because of our stock is one of the largest on the Iberian Peninsula, and because of our effectiveness, with guaranteed 24-hour delivery. But, we won’t lie, getting here wasn’t easy. It almost never is. The road that led us here is littered with the many sleepless hours and tons of effort we put in. Uncertainty, sharp and harrowing, was a constant companion on this road.
And now, on looking back, we find only good things sticking around, and we believe it was worth it. And we know that, even as we say this, the road isn’t over yet.
We still have a long way to go, all while offering our clients just what they need (the best O-Rings, for instance) in the shortest possible time.
But we have walked a good chunk of this road, and we want to share it with you, so you know us a little better.
JIOrings was founded in 2004, stemming from the determination of three friends to make a project come true, and to things their own way. The friends were Jean Albert, Iñigo and Oscar, from whose names the company’s name comes from (their initials), and O-rings. In the beginning, they had the help of Hidro Rubber Ibérica, S.A., from the Tecno-Invest group, which bought a 51% stake in the partnership.
The first two years, the three partners did a bit of everything on their own: sales, purchasing, warehousing and management. In 2006 they hired their first employee, Fernando, who would oversee the warehouse, and since then, a new member has been hired practically every year, until the current figure of twelve.
The year 2011 saw the highest growth for JIOrings. And in 2013, we unleashed our supportive spirit, one of the identifying traits of JIOrings, by supporting Born to Learn, Conenteo Haiztak Chess Club, Galdakao Boleibol Taldea, and our biker lsaak Rosillo. Before that, we had supported the AFIM foundation.
In that same year, arguably the single most important event since our inception happened: JIOrings and Hidro Rubber Ibérica split up. We founded JIOHOLDING, S.L., and bought a 51% stake on it, to make future cooperation possible.
In 2014, we decided to change our “look”. New corporate image (logo, website, office equipment, etc.) so we could attend “groomed” to our tenth anniversary celebration. Here you can see a few pictures of the party, and of the people of our small family. In 2014, we also made heavy investment in internationalization.
And on 2015 we have, for the first time ever, a Commercial in the north zone (up until then we had only tried on Catalonia and Andalucía), and we have been taking digital marketing and communications very seriously, which allows you to read this post right now.
We hope this has helped you get to know us a little better and that we can meet, and even work together in the near future.
Oh, and also check this video we made for our tenth anniversary, where our trajectory is very well described.
From Tanzania I would import the “pole-pole”: Slow-Slow
In JIOrings we deal in O-Rings and solidarity: here is a very interesting interview with one of the founders of Born to Learn, a NGO we support.
We are JIOrings. As we like to put it, the quickest way to an O-ring. In our warehouses you can find 23 million O-Rings, one million Quad-Rings, 350,000 back-up seals, 130,000 V-Rings, 50,000 U-Rings, 50,000 meters worth of cord ring, 50,000 wipers and a whole lot more.
As you can see, we’re staked up. However, even if our shelves are overflowing, we always save a little space. Do you know what for? Solidarity. One of the projects we support is the NGO Born to Learn, which focuses their efforts in offering a better future to the children of a community north of Tanzania (Africa). The work they do is truly praise worthy, and rekindles our faith in mankind. If you don’t believe us, check this video.
We have interviewed one of its founders, Asier Urrutikoetxea, who told us very interesting things.
For instance, that he would import the “pole-pole”, slow-slow from Tanzania to his homeland, the Basque Country. “Everything is done with no rush, and I believe it’s very, very healthy”, he tells us.
– How and when did Born to Lean Appear?
– A few years ago, I actually combed the internet to find a place where I could volunteer my work, and I had a very hard time finding a place where they wouldn’t charge me for helping. I couldn’t believe that, just for helping out, I had to pay a ton of money on a weekly or monthly basis!
After a first experience with a NGO that operated in Moshi (Tanzania), which didn’t stand up to my expectations of really helping the needy, I joined forces with other three volunteers and we decided to do something on our own about the children we saw on the street during school time.
Thanks to Pastor Emmanuel, we were able to contact their families, and began giving lessons to 50 kids. We set up that limit because we were just 4 volunteers that didn’t speak Swahili, and we wanted to offer quality education without wearing ourselves down. But every single day, 4 or 5 kids who also wanted to be a part of the project showed up, until we winded up with 70 requests. We couldn’t keep up, and had no choice but to close admissions, which pained us a lot, because they just kept coming and coming.
After a two-week test, in a venue Pastor Emmanuel graciously ceded us with no religious binding whatsoever, we decided we wanted to know the opinion of the children and their families, to find out if our work was actually being useful. All of the parents were just thrilled, and so were the kids, so we decided to start for real in January 2011. That’s how Born to Learn was born.
Very soon we started getting donations from friends and families, which enabled us to enroll the children who could read and write in public schools, hire two local teachers who helped us with the language so we could teach the kids we couldn’t enroll in school, and hire a cook who prepared meals with which to complement the kids’ nourishment (many of them ate just once a day) during school breaks.
Once all the donations and ideas to give continuity to the project were depleted, the idea of the KaribuHostel came up, a hostel that supplies us with a steady monthly income.
– Who’s behind Born to Learn?
– It is currently managed by Samantha Peñalver and me. We have the help of a field coordinator, Elena. And behind us, we have the whole network of volunteers that have gone through Born to Learn, people who take supportive action to raise funds.
We have received donations from companies and Institutions. JIOrings helps us with a monthly donation; one family helps us with an annual one; the Galdakao city council has made two contributions so far, one for 6,700 Euros, and another for almost 6,000 Euros. The Zalla city council gave us 18,000 Euros to build the school, and there is also the income the KaribuHostel generates. We have also had specific donations, like from the Zurbaranbarri School for 1,700 Euros. And, of course, supportive donations from friends of Samantha’s or my own, or of volunteers that have cooperated with the project in situ.
– What is the project’s objective?
– To build a school in the Mvuleni community, so no child is left without schooling. To do our part in the achieving of universal primary education, which is one of the eight UN’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015.
– What inspired you to create Born to Learn?
. I’ve always loved to visit remote places and help people. In Tanzania, I really felt the need of trying to do something about those kids who didn’t get a chance to go to school. We started little by little, and it snowballed, and we’re still on it!
– How would you define yourself?
– I am a sociable person, who wants to see the world and help others as much as possible.
– How has Born to Learn changed your life?
– In the past I used to get really bored, but not anymore. Born to Learn completely fills that void in me. I devote more hours of the day to the project than to my own teaching job. There is always something to do: responding to volunteers’ or tourists’ emails, updating the site, raising capital by organizing events, raffles, flea markets. All of this from home.
And whenever I visit Tanzania, the workload triples. I manage the project, the hostel, welcome new volunteers, do the follow up of sponsored children, give lessons, take part in the building efforts, and even learn masonry. I have no time to get bored.
All this work has an enormous reward: the feeling of well-being that follows knowing and feeling that the local people (the boys, girls, their parents and the village people) appreciates you, because we are working with them in improving their lives, and ours.
– You’re soon going back to Tanzania. How do you prepare for the experience of a new trip to Africa? Especially now that you travel with your family.
– Actually there‘s a lot to prepare. From renewing our passports, to get one issued for our little Afrika (the name of his daughter).
Update the vaccination calendar, withdraw a few dollars for the arrival, tying up any bureaucratic loose ends, packing up, thinking what to bring and what to leave, what should I bring that can’t be found there: ham, tuna, sunflower seeds, diving mask, ear plugs, wine, patxaran. It’s a very long list.
Before it was easy, because I travelled very light, but travelling with a one-year-old makes the logistics get complicated: the baby carriage, the cradle, the backpack, diapers, towels…We’re going to be loaded to the gills, but the family experience will be worth it.
– What’s your day in Tanzania going to be like?
– Unhurried. Going with such a little girl. I won’t exert myself to the level of the times when I dedicated 24 hours to the project. We may rent a house, instead of lodging in the hostel, because it’s very busy and we’ll want to be comfortable.
Also, we will surely rent a car, instead of riding on daladalas or trucks like we used to do, for Afrika’s safety and comfort. From there, we will visit the project a few times a week to teach lessons and help in the building of the school, and will enjoy the magnitude the time adopts in Tanzania.
– From the Tanzanian way of life, what would you like our society to have? And what would you export there from the Basque Country?
– The pole-pole (slow-slow). Everything is done with no rush, and I believe it to be very very healthy. And like any good Basque, I would export our gastronomy.
– How can I support Born to Learn?
– By visiting Tanzania and helping us with the classes, with the construction efforts, on the health issues, by farming. By lodging on the KaribuHostel when you visit Tanzania, an ideal place if you’re going to climb the Kilimanjaro, go on a Safari through the Serengeti or visit the Ngorongoro crater for instance. By making a donation (more info on www.borntolearn.eu/); or by helping us sell numbers for a solidarity raffle, in December, of a classic 1961 Volkswagen Beetle, or even by buying one.
The O-Ring and its universality
That ring has become the quintessential one, used in all kind of industrial sectors and in other ones as amazing as jewelry or optics.
It is the universal seal. The O-Ring is the simplest and most versatile of all the standard seals: thanks to its unsophisticated shape, its use has spread to all industries (taps, car industries, pipes, hydraulics, pneumatics, flanges, pumps…), which has enabled the development of efficient processes and large-scale outputs, and, as a consequence, it has lead to huge savings in terms of manufacturing costs.
But O-Rings are much more than that. Did you know that they are used in sectors such amazing as jewelry? Yes, as decorative patterns. And they are very popular as wristbands as well.
In the industrial field, the function of the O-Ring is to ensure the sealing of both gaseous and liquid fluids between removable parts. As you can easily imagine, this is critical in many applications. Its own energizing properties enable a great sealing capacity, which increases as the pressure raises in the system.
An anecdote that you may not know: in 1986, the NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger was disintegrated a few seconds after it took off. Seemingly, some O-rings had been subjected to very cold temperatures but the raw material had been not correctly chosen.
If you want to know more about O-Rings, you can download our pdf by clicking here.
And if you want to purchase, this is the right place. We guarantee quickness, availability and advice. And express deliveries all over the world.
For any request, please do not hesitate to contact us.
2015 Biscaye chess teams championship
The 2015 Biscaye Teams Championship started at the beginning of January.
Let’s hope that our brand new shirt brings us luck!
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
Here we are again, expecting Santa Klaus to come!
Is there anything cuter than a child’s wondered smile discovering a JIOrings’ seals box??!!
All our best wishes for Xmas and 2015.
JIOrings: 10th Anniversary
On November, 14th, JIOrings celebrated its 10th anniversary. We’d just like to thank very much all the people who supported us and made our project come true.
We especially think about those who gave us the opportunity to start well: Fernando and Bego, Valentino, Arcadio, Sabino and the great staffs of Hidro Rubber Ibérica and Tecno-Invest. We do not want to forget Jon Angulo, who helped us to change our mind and teached us how to go our own way.
Eventually, many thanks to our clients and suppliers for their trust and support all over these years. Thanks to all of you, today, JIOrings keeps defending all the values we believe in: social responsibility, environmental respect and harmony between personal and professional life.
We expect you to be with us in ten years.
Thank you, gracias, eskerrik asko.
JIOrings, the quickest way to find a seal.