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IN LATE 2016, MICHAEL E. JORDAN wanted to boost holiday sales
for his fedgling athletic-wear company, UNRL, which is
based in St. Paul. So he hired a drone operator to shoot
some sweeping aerial footage of the city—his hometown—
and created a video interspersing that footage with
mannequins and people wearing UNRL clothing.
The video went viral, getting 50,000 Facebook views,
and, Jordan says, UNRL’s sales over that Black Friday weekend tripled the prior year’s. The company now counts the
NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks as a client. And Jordan continues
to make videos with drones. “We’re not Nike and didn’t
have $100,000,” Jordan says. For his frst drone video, “I
spent just $1,000—which included editing, shooting, and
renting the drone.” Like other founders, Jordan has found
drones can be used creatively, to make doing tasks faster,
cheaper, and safer—even for businesses that don’t seem
like a natural ft for the technology. —LAUREN BARACK
• Going underground
Hired by insurance companies
to investigate claims, Jeremy
Reynolds, COO of forensics
investigation frm RTI Group,
in Stevensville, Maryland, had a
client that wanted a mine surveyed. Underground, and presumably unstable, the mine posed a
problem: The site was too unsafe
to send a person into, and a rolling
robot could get blocked by debris.
Reynolds’s solution? A drone.
Flying a drone underground is
hardly simple: There’s no access
to GPS and you can’t watch the
drone as it fies. But it worked,
says Reynolds, and he can’t
think of another way the mine
could have been surveyed.
“With the UAV [unmanned aerial
vehicle], we got around issues
we couldn’t have otherwise,”
he says.
• Drone cowboy
Cody Creelman, a veterinarian
based in Airdrie, Alberta, travels
hundreds of miles to visit cattle
ranchers who are clients of
Veterinary Agri-Health Services,
where he’s co-owner and man-
aging partner. Creelman bought
his frst drone, a DJI Phantom 3,
for about 800 Canadian dollars
(roughly U.S.$600) in 2016.
Besides using the drone to
shoot video blogs, Creelman
puts the UAV out to pasture to
make sure all cattle are rounded
up while he runs medical exams
such as pregnancy tests.
Typically, a ranch hand is sent
on horseback to double-check
that all the animals are counted.
But with his drone, Creelman
can buzz a feld in minutes.
And the cows don’t mind the
whirligig fying in their faces.
“Cows don’t look for predators
from above, so they react well
and don’t even look up,” he
says, “and the farmers love the
technology.” Creelman also
uses his drone footage, he says,
“to develop training materials
for my cattle ranchers, by creating customized management
protocols based on aerial photographs of their farms.”
If you think drones aren’t for your business—
well, these founders once thought that too
THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
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Key facts and
fgures behind
this trending
technology
62,340
Number of remote-pilot certifcates
issued by the FAA
as of September 2017
TIP SHEET DRONES
$150
Typical fee test
centers charge
to administer the
Part 107 exam
•2016 Year the FAA frst
required remote-pilot certifcates
•
