Tomu Inc., a D.C. hospitality startup, has tripled its workforce over the past year as it readies to ship its first prefabricated lodging units across the country.
Founder and CEO Chris Osaka told me the company's workforce has grown from eight employees to about two dozen people to keep pace with demand it's seeing for its pre-built villas.
That hiring ramp-up, spurred by a $500,000 loan backed by the Small Business Administration that Tomu obtained in June 2023, will continue throughout the year as Osaka said he expects to have between 40 and 45 employees before 2025.
Tomu's clients are mainly boutique hospitality developers looking to install and rent out modular homes in scenic locations, though its first unit, a studio villa with one bathroom, is being shipped to a private client in Northern Virginia. Another unit is heading to the Hamptons in New York and others will be shipped to North Carolina and Tennessee later this year. Next year, it plans to send units to Texas and internationally to Turks and Caicos.
Osaka said the company's backlog, which includes pre-orders placed two years ago, extends to June of next year. The startup's goal is to churn out about two units per week from the 50,000-square-foot production space it leased in the former Fairchild Aviation facility at the Hagerstown Regional Airport last summer.
Initially, clients were pre-ordering individual units, but Tomu is seeing some customers place orders for more than 20 units at a time.
The company's preference remains focused on building units for leisure travel despite strong interest from residential uses for its villas, which can be modified to be akin to accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, on land shared with a larger home. Osaka said he's being careful not to market to individual landowners, noting that bulk sales to hospitality companies come with better margins.
"It's one of those things, especially in residential, there's so much demand that we're really careful about how strongly we market because we'll frankly get inundated with interest," he said. "Over this summer, we were pretty quiet with our marketing just so that we could make sure that we had the leeway, the capacity, to get all this backlog of pre-orders out the door."
Tomu is primarily selling the villas to boutique hospitality companies but Osaka said he has been in discussions with "major flag brands" that he declined to identify.
"As they are in the early stages we have to respect the confidentiality of the clients," he said.
He declined to share revenue figures for the company, which DC Inno recognized as one of its Startups to Watch in 2022.
Per marketing details on its website, a 252-square-foot studio and one-bathroom villa starts at $85,000, while a 1,380-square-foot, two-bedroom and two-and-a-half bathroom villa, the largest unit it makes, starts at $325,000. Clients can make customizations to these villas to alter various finishings like flooring, cabinetry and countertops for an additional cost. The price does not include site prep, installation, utility hookup and other costs.
