And I'll be the sixth one to quote you, sorry.
My goal in this company is to produce the best ski I can make and be able to give it to people for as cheap as possible. Everything else comes after these two principles.
Last year when I joined the company, we were making tons of Billy Goats, and in finishing, we werent happy. We ended up scrapping all the skis because they weren't a high enough quality. Mostly minor things too, like edges being a bit thin in the tips. I've seen thinner edges at ski shops from major manufacturers, and yeah, they could have gone out and lasted as long as any ski would. But what I'm passionate about is making a better ski. Theres no point in us making small batches of OCD-induced handcrafted and finished skis if they're only as good as everything else.
We did have our delays, and we've stressed how sorry we were to people who canceled last year. It was a rough year last year, Scott and I definitely didnt sleep much, or have days off or ski or see our friends or family. But in the end we were satisfied with the skis we were making and are proud of the quality we've achieved. With double the workforce in here and a huge jump on the season, delays should be history for us, and we're making double the number of skis we could last year. We've got different things planned for this year and you'll see proof of that soon. Not to spoil anything, but we are running a huge demo tour this year. We always have had demo skis at our factory (we had every model and size last year, will again this year), and Mt Hood is conveniently almost always open. Shops are a longer discussion, but the quick of it is, to really do shops we either need to charge a lot more for our skis or produce in a much larger volume than we're doing now, and I wont ever push for an increase in volume if that means I can no longer hand inspect and work with ever ski that comes out of our press.
If its anything to back up what I'm saying, people that have our skis are happy, I think. You just had three people above me offer to lend their personal pair to you or anyone to try them out, kinda cool.