alford wrote: ↑Sun Jul 16, 2017 3:26 pm
For the record I hope they are doing well, just sounds like a company on a shoestring budget. Why are things so tight? I'd guess sales, if sales were great they'd have more money.
You're reading way too much into it. TIME is tight and limited, not money for product development resources. Like all kite companies they have a head designer and tester that can only focus on so much at a time so they prioritize which products are next in line. Sure they could hire more staff, spend more on riders, move their offices to San Francisco, and ended up bankrupt like Best but they have built a great company running lean and selling direct (which ironically Best use to do), so why throw more resources at it to keep things to a tight schedule when they have a sound lean business model?
Frankly, Switch are far more open and transparent with the state of their product development. Most kite companies stay quite till the product is announced and the fancy video is shot, but Switch give updates on their forum and when you email them up they are even more open so it's hard to fairly compare them to other brands that don't share their progress or delays. We just don't hear about the f*** ups in other companies until their products are recalled.
I was one of the guys waiting up until last month for an updated release of the element 6. However after chatting with felix he assured me the drift on the element 5 was a big improvement from the element 4 and the kite had no immediate improvements so there was no point in changing the color just to have an annual release like most of the other brands do. I like that approach better than what I see with North, Cabrinha, Naish, and Slingshot. I went ahead and bought an element 5 7m pretty much a year after it's original release and I'm super happy with it. Last week I used it for the first time foiling in 11kt gusting 16kt and it drifted, floated, looped, and responded like a dream.
I'm doing a trip around NZ in October and will stop by their headquarters to check it out. I'll let you know if the windows are boarded up.