Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Dwindle Factory Tour


I used this video in an earlier post but it was only recently available to be embedded so here it is. Dwindle had a press release in 2004 stating that they were moving their board manufacturing to China. One statement from the release didn't make sense to me:
The vast majority of pro US decks are pressed 4-6 at a time, yielding tremendous deviation in the stack. Consequently, most high level skate pros reject 60-80% of general production. All Chop Chop’s decks are individually pressed, yielding absolute consistency.

Why move production to China to save money if you are going to press boards one at a time, which takes longer and costs more? The video does illustrate how they pull this off and I can't believe no one else had thought of it. Gotta give props to the Mutt.

Unfortunately, I don't think the savings funnel down to the end user (skaters). It's just more profit for those further up the chain. Namely, retailers and distributors.