Direct to the
People You Serve.

Cutting the price is the obvious reason to sell direct.

It is not the only one, and it may not even be the most important.

There are three.

Direct is harder. I know that.

The easy path is to manufacture a thousand frames, sell them to distributors, take the money, and walk away.

I do not do that, and I am not going to.

Money is not the goal.

It never has been, and it has never been what drives me.

What drives me is solving a problem, improving something, and doing the thing people say cannot be done.

I have a long-term mind.

Moving fast is not the same as wanting results now.

I move fast because when you move fast you learn faster, and when you learn faster you improve faster.

I will take the harder path that teaches me over the easy path that just pays.

Here is the part that matters more than the money, and it is specific to this sport.

There are dealers and stores all over the world selling three-wheel frames and telling skaters they feel like ice.

They say it with confidence.

And most of them have never skated on a three-wheel frame, or a four-wheel frame, or any of it.

They are repeating what the brand told them to say.

To honestly tell a skater that something feels like ice, you have to have skated on ice, and on the three-wheel setup, and on the four-wheel setup, and felt the difference under your own feet.

I have skated on all of them.

That is the whole reason I can tell you the truth about them.

And the truth is geometry.

Three wheels give two balance zones.

Four wheels give three.

An ice blade has three.

A three-wheel frame cannot feel like ice, because it has no central balance zone, and no rear balance zone extending behind the boot to lean back on for the moves that need it.

On ice you have both. On three wheels you do not.

No wheel, however smooth, changes that, because it is not about the wheel. It is about how many balance zones the frame gives you.

This is the part I care about most.

Selling direct gives me a relationship with every single person who buys the product.

Think of it like a store on a high street where the only way to buy is to walk in and have a conversation with me.

I can answer your questions correctly, because I am the one who knows.

If you buy from a shop, I have no idea what the person behind the counter told you.

When you buy direct, there is no counter and no stranger in between.

There is you, and there is me.

Buying direct means you can:

You get faster, better help, from the person who designed the frame, skates on it, coaches on it and performs on it.

You get the person behind the product and the vision, not a script.

And I get your feedback directly, which is how the products actually improve.

Put the three things together and you can see why direct is not a preference.

It is the only model that actually serves the people the company exists for.

The price comes down, so more skaters can afford good equipment.

The feedback comes straight back, so the equipment gets better faster.

And the claims stay honest, because the person selling is the person who skated it.

A distributor model would break all three at once.

It would push the price up, cut the feedback line, and hand the selling to people repeating things they have never tested.

The next paper in this series, Let Other People Carry It, answers the obvious question direct raises.

If there are no distributors and no middlemen, how does the product ever reach skaters who have never heard of it.

The answer is the opposite of a middleman, and it is one of the most important ideas in the whole build.