Curiosity and persistence can take you a long way and Bryce Sills is proof. In this episode, Jim sits down with SendCutSend’s Director of Sales to trace his journey from small-town Washington to running businesses, designing products, and even getting swept up in a Texas pinball fiasco before landing at SendCutSend. Bryce shares how hands-on experience, adaptability, and a love for solving problems shaped his path and continues to guide his approach to leadership and manufacturing today.
This episode of Just Gonna Send It pairs host Jim Belosic with Bryce Sills, Director of Sales at SendCutSend, who also leads Support and DFM. Bryce’s path runs from small-town Pacific Northwest tinkering to end-to-end retail build-outs, through a spectacular pinball-industry implosion, and back into entrepreneurship, before he ultimately joined SendCutSend to scale customer experience and design-for-manufacture from his base in San Antonio.
Bryce grew up outside Seattle in a rural, tractor-to-school kind of town. Weekends around his grandfather’s pre-war Fords made mechanics feel transparent. His father, an electrical engineer in the shrinking microfiche industry, brought him to the shop to tear down assemblies, sort hardware, and rebuild mechanisms, child-labor jokes aside, it was an early apprenticeship in how machines are actually put together. By 15 he’d bought a well-used ’86 Honda Prelude with grocery-store savings, learned the language of clutches, taps, and drill presses, and discovered that when a part doesn’t exist you either invent it or go slower. Late-night industrial-park drag racing was less about trophies than about learning the feedback loop between ideas, fabrication, and results.
Post-high school he worked in screen printing and sign shops, where a wrist injury moved him from the press to vector design. FreeHand and vinyl cutters taught him precision, tolerances, and how to translate a customer’s fuzzy picture into manufacturable geometry. That 2D fluency made 3D modeling feel approachable later: instead of staring down parametric CAD from zero, he already thought in layers, outlines, radii, and fit. He learned how drawings drive fixtures, how a small change in a sketch compounds through fabrication, and how “art files” become real parts without blowing up timelines.
At ENCO in Seattle, Bryce spent a decade delivering turnkey optometry offices: display systems, casework, lighting, finishes, and medical equipment, all coordinated, permitted, built, shipped, and installed. The 2008 recession forced a brutal cross-training exercise; as headcount shrank he absorbed CAD/CAM, nesting, vendor sourcing, install logistics, and field fixes. He learned the hard math of lead times and margins, how to design for pack-out and rapid install, and why “beautiful on screen” can fail when it hits freight elevators, mall curfews, or carpet that won’t color-match under store lighting. That period fused his design instincts with schedule discipline and cost control.
Nights and weekends, Bryce launched a garage-based product design studio. He quoted jobs, held the risk, and felt every penny of scope creep. A surprising niche opened with public artists: he translated renderings into weather-resistant, buildable assemblies with sensible materials, fasteners, and installation sequences. That work made him a practical translator, fluent in a client’s vision and a fabricator’s reality, and reinforced a core belief: perfect is often the enemy of shippable.
Bryce moved to San Antonio for a manufacturing-engineer role at a pinball startup that promised a fully equipped factory. On day one the “factory” consisted of a handful of mismatched machines and a fantasy production plan. Twelve months later the SEC shut the company down over a massive investment fraud; paychecks stopped, vendors went unpaid, and Bryce’s new network was scorched. It was a painful masterclass in interviewing for reality (tour the shop, validate tooling, walk the flow) and in how to recover when a job collapses overnight.
The morning after the shutdown he incorporated in Texas and said yes to almost everything, design, prototyping, small-batch builds, leaning heavily on SendCutSend for fast, low-MOQ laser parts to keep work moving. He briefly contracted with another pinball company, pushing modern mechanisms and rapid iteration. When SendCutSend announced openings, he applied with a part-time proposal purely to be close to a platform he already depended on. That “date us first” arrangement evolved into a full-time commitment.
Today Bryce leads Sales, Support, and DFM from San Antonio for a distributed team. He builds processes that codify empathy for builders: quoting that reflects manufacturing reality, DFM feedback that teaches rather than blocks, and support that shortens design-to-part loops. His background, running installs, fixing fit issues in the field, feeling the burn of missed dependencies, shapes how he coaches teams to set honest expectations, prevent upstream mistakes, and keep momentum without worshiping “perfect.”
If you want to work in fabrication or manufacturing, get inside a shop, any shop. Sweep floors, observe, ask respectful questions, and learn by doing on someone else’s machines before you buy your own. Use CAD to think, not to procrastinate; design for how parts will be cut, bent, packed, shipped, and installed. Vet opportunities with your own eyes: walk the floor, verify tooling, and map the flow. When plans go sideways, ship something small quickly, momentum beats overthinking.
In this episode of Just Gonna Send It, host Jim Belosic talks with Bryce Sills, Director of Sales at SendCutSend, about his unconventional path from tinkering in the Pacific Northwest to leading remote teams in digital manufacturing. Bryce shares how early exposure to his dad’s microfiche machines and his grandfather’s antique cars sparked a lifelong curiosity about how things work. That curiosity led from drag racing and designing T-shirts to building full-scale optometry stores, running his own product design business, and even surviving a spectacular collapse of a pinball startup shut down by the SEC. Through each twist, Bryce learned the realities of fabrication, entrepreneurship, and leadership, how to balance creativity with practicality, and why “good enough and done” often beats “perfect but late.” Now overseeing Sales, Support, and DFM at SendCutSend from his home in San Antonio, he reflects on the value of hands-on experience, learning by doing, and leading with empathy for both makers and customers.
