A comment we hear from time to time is, “Why doesn’t Walker design a mower that costs less and competes with some of the other lower-priced mowers on the market”? The quick answer is that we try to design equipment that we would like to buy ourselves, and we just happen to have a taste for high-quality equipment. In our family, we grew up with the idea that we would be willing to pay more to get more value. We are not talking about “luxury” here, but simply high quality and high value to match. So we have never had much interest in building “cheap” or designing to hit a low price point. If that is considered a fault of ours, then we are guilty as charged.
In thinking about the design of a machine, the machine often takes on the personality traits of the designers. That is, unless the machine is designed by a design team (committee) as is sometimes done in big corporate culture. In our case, the Walker Mower primarily reflects the personalities of my brother, Dean Walker, and from earlier times, my dad, Max Walker. You can see a lot of my brother’s design DNA in our machines as he has honed his skills across the years and recalled the core beliefs and ideas that came from growing up around our dad.
When you hear Dean talk about what he believes in and what he is passionate about, you can see it in the mower design. Dean has an obsession with the performance of a machine (making it do the best at what it was designed to do) and continuously works to improve performance; never being satisfied, never being done making improvement. He likes to keep working and improving an earlier design as a priority over starting a new project.
For a lawn mower, Dean sees extra weight as the enemy and he tends to use aircraft design principles—design for strength and not by weight or simply adding “boiler plate”. Quick accessibility to working parts and easy replacement of parts is a design goal that was started with my dad when he designed the Walker Executive Golf Car in 1957 with a tilt-up body. And then there is the importance of making a compact design with tight packaging—anyone can make a big contraption—it takes passion, talent and clear vision to design a compact machine. Lastly, Dean likes to make a machine that will last a long time and works to avoid “planned” obsolescence. Many of the new design improvements are deliberately designed to be installed as upgrades on earlier models.
When you see a Walker Mower, it is a Walker because it was designed by a Walker. Yes, it may cost more than some, but it is an authentic machine that comes from our family and we just happen to want to design and make machines we would want to buy ourselves.
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