Our sport harbours many of the things in life that just make you wanna go hmmmmm.... one would have thought our industry would have focused itself upon one of the die-hard principles of American culture and that is, to make as much money as is humanly possible, and in some cases inhumanly possible ... but this somewhat unhealthy pursuit of the green god takes discipline and a singularity of mind; there was a time in paintball when any idiot could make money selling paintball gear .. and trust me, many an idiot did just that.
Paintball went through a halcyon period of sales when Midas touches were ‘two a penny’ with bank balances nudging the ‘disgustingly embarrassing’ but all good things allegedly come to an end and we inevitably crashed, banged and walloped ourselves into a recession with the weak among us getting splattered across our respective yearly accounts.
It’s hard to imagine anybody who left our industry with enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives being attracted back into paintball while any of them still possessed neuronal activity between their ears ... it surely is an insane proposition to believe in ..... why on earth would anybody risk any of their heard-earned money investing in paintball again, especially now of all times ... it just makes no sense, not to me anyhow.
But... as some of you will already know, ‘paintball’ and ‘sense’ are not so much unwilling bedfellows, they are in most cases, mutually exclusive.
We already know that some of paintball’s founding heroes, the likes of John Gregory, Tom Kaye and Budd Orr have all pastured themselves out never to return [so far] but we now see a few old faces returning from our industry’s dead-box ..... Richmond Italia is one such individual though his re-emergence isn’t recent in that he has been nudging his way back into our industry portfolio for a year or so with his attempt to re-ignite the financial fires of our sport with a 50 calibre alternative paintball.
Richmond had previously sold his company Procaps to a conglomerate some years back and took his third share of a bazillion bucks off to the arguably warm embrace of Montreal before deciding to dip his Canuckian toe back in the paintball water.
Gino Postorivo once owned National Paintball Supplies before selling out to Kee Action Sports a few years back back-pocketing a reported cool $12 mill and then we had the recent demise of the Gardner brothers with Smart Parts, a disaster that has already been well documented.
Mind you, even though the company may have taken a dive that Greg Louganis would have been proud of, the brothers Gardner ain’t skint by any means.
This trio of company buy-outs and demises left a vacuum that we all believed would be filled by the suit brigade, people who sit round board tables discussing bottom lines, shares and stocks;
Boring farts who have as much soul for our sport as a butt plug.
These type people know the cost of everything in our industry but do not know the value of anything .. and never can, they are not ballers like all those guys previously mentioned, they are figureheads and by that I mean they deal in figures, nothing more.
And now ... out of the lunacy our sport so often inspires, we have Gino, Richmond and the Gardner brothers all making a comeback thus condemning any notion we may have had in believing our industry was maturing along rational lines.
Gino has crashed back in with Valken paintball and the Gardners have now come back into our industry with their new company called Gog Paintball ... someone allegedly noted that ‘Gog’ in Germany is translated as ‘cock’ and so it seems any German launch of the Gardner’s new company could well be received with a certain chuckle ... still, they say ‘sex sells’ though I fear not so much in this case.
And so the burning question seems to be, why the hell would these guys come back into an industry that’s about as buoyant as an anvil?
We have no growth, no green shoots, we do have however a slide of monumental proportions that still hasn’t stopped steepening.
Our industry could well rewrite the economics books as the most dramatic fall from grace ever documented; we live in hope recovery is around the corner but in the meantime, anybody wishing to invest in our market would do well to unbuckle the straps that pin their arms back in that nice white coat.
Ahhh, ‘therein lies the rub’ as Billy Shakespeare once noted ... it would seem our beloved industry has more than its fair share of admirers inspiring an almost maniacal devotion to duty.
Commentators have suggested these guys mentioned all possess an ego far too large for their own financial good ... but can it be that simple?
Can we really put this resurrection shuffle down to people’s self-image where it demands they return just to cultivate what they believe is something so fleeting as personal fulfilment brought about by other people’s adulation or respect?
My knee jerk is ‘Nah, can’t be, surely not’..... maybe someone as vain as myself could well submit themselves to such indulgence but not these guys.
I will readily concede they would have gotten bored just living off their millions but hey, give me a try, and trust me, you wouldn’t see me for dust .... it could be they need to earn money and after all, paintball is the business they know and so where better?
Let me explain something here, I know these guys pretty well and I also know they ain’t short of a few bucks, far from it ... in fact, f’kin far from it .. if you added their combined wealth together, it would equal the gross yearly turnover of a medium sized African nation and so the likes of Gino and Co ain't gotta work for their living that’s for sure.
I think commonsense is jettisoned pretty quickly when pondering the question of why these guys were so willing to make a comeback but you’d tend to think that maybe the timing of their return is somewhat inappropriate.
I mean, it’s not as if the paintball market is setting the place alight at the moment ... sales are down everywhere across the US and there is little to no investment in our sport from anybody.
These guys are basically using their own money to try and climb back onto the paintball wagon which at the moment has lost a couple of wheels .... one of them being the steering wheel.
Still, it’s their money, they can do with it as they see fit but from the outside, it certainly seems an over-risky endeavour.
I suppose though, we must readily concede these guys are extremely successful if we define success in terms of how much money you have in the bank and maybe, just maybe, they know what they are doing ... it may well come down to perspective, I most certainly view present circumstances in our industry being about as attractive as a baboon’s ass but then again, I’m poor.
It may well be poor people like myself are precluded from seeing opportune times such as these but I’ve yet to be convinced that a 70% reduction in overall sales when compared to 5 years ago, with no recovery in sight, with not one indication the sales down slope has even threatened to level out is a good time to invest ... call me a wussy boy if you like but the signs are there guys, it may well be the time to invest your money in something much less risky such as betting it all on black as a paintball clatters its way around the roulette wheel.
We must remember though, people like Gino, Richmond and the Gardner brothers didn’t get rich by accident, they must have done something right in the past and so it just may be they are smarter than the average bear thus explaining their somewhat curious return.
For my part, I rejoice they have returned, I know Billy, Adam and Richmond pretty well and have gotten on with all of them well enough in the past … they have paintballs in their respective nut-sacks, believe me … they love our sport, and we need them more than they need us, that’s for sure.
I know Richmond and he’s a one-off, he has never lost the ability to keep his feet on the ground … I’m sure he possesses an ego but it never comes across as being oversized and most certainly not too big for his own good, Richmond is proud of what he’s achieved and rightly so, the boy’s done good in my book and he’s a good mate and so you won’t hear a bad word from me.
And like the others, we need Richmond more than he needs us .. of that I am 100% sure.
I don’t really know as Gino well however, for some reason I never really got close to him like I did with the others; as for his character and intentions?
I am not gonna second guess why he has returned or what he’s up to but I do know this, his presence in the marketplace will most certainly shake things up.
He will undoubtedly create a more competitive environment which is good for the customer but I’ve yet to be convinced the pressure to lower prices is all that good for margins especially when the numbers ain’t there. It looks as though he’s squaring up to Kee which as some of you may know is one big mofo and not one I’d like to meet in an industry dark alley somewhere.
Still, Gino must know what he’s doing cos for sure, he’s one smart guy.
The next year or so should be fun for the spectator but I’m not so sure everybody is gonna get out of this fight alive …. Let’s hope this ‘resurrection shuffle’ doesn’t turn out to be an ‘insurrection scuffle’ cos if it does, companies get hurt …
Paintball went through a halcyon period of sales when Midas touches were ‘two a penny’ with bank balances nudging the ‘disgustingly embarrassing’ but all good things allegedly come to an end and we inevitably crashed, banged and walloped ourselves into a recession with the weak among us getting splattered across our respective yearly accounts.
It’s hard to imagine anybody who left our industry with enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives being attracted back into paintball while any of them still possessed neuronal activity between their ears ... it surely is an insane proposition to believe in ..... why on earth would anybody risk any of their heard-earned money investing in paintball again, especially now of all times ... it just makes no sense, not to me anyhow.
But... as some of you will already know, ‘paintball’ and ‘sense’ are not so much unwilling bedfellows, they are in most cases, mutually exclusive.
We already know that some of paintball’s founding heroes, the likes of John Gregory, Tom Kaye and Budd Orr have all pastured themselves out never to return [so far] but we now see a few old faces returning from our industry’s dead-box ..... Richmond Italia is one such individual though his re-emergence isn’t recent in that he has been nudging his way back into our industry portfolio for a year or so with his attempt to re-ignite the financial fires of our sport with a 50 calibre alternative paintball.
Richmond had previously sold his company Procaps to a conglomerate some years back and took his third share of a bazillion bucks off to the arguably warm embrace of Montreal before deciding to dip his Canuckian toe back in the paintball water.
Gino Postorivo once owned National Paintball Supplies before selling out to Kee Action Sports a few years back back-pocketing a reported cool $12 mill and then we had the recent demise of the Gardner brothers with Smart Parts, a disaster that has already been well documented.
Mind you, even though the company may have taken a dive that Greg Louganis would have been proud of, the brothers Gardner ain’t skint by any means.
This trio of company buy-outs and demises left a vacuum that we all believed would be filled by the suit brigade, people who sit round board tables discussing bottom lines, shares and stocks;
Boring farts who have as much soul for our sport as a butt plug.
These type people know the cost of everything in our industry but do not know the value of anything .. and never can, they are not ballers like all those guys previously mentioned, they are figureheads and by that I mean they deal in figures, nothing more.
And now ... out of the lunacy our sport so often inspires, we have Gino, Richmond and the Gardner brothers all making a comeback thus condemning any notion we may have had in believing our industry was maturing along rational lines.
Gino has crashed back in with Valken paintball and the Gardners have now come back into our industry with their new company called Gog Paintball ... someone allegedly noted that ‘Gog’ in Germany is translated as ‘cock’ and so it seems any German launch of the Gardner’s new company could well be received with a certain chuckle ... still, they say ‘sex sells’ though I fear not so much in this case.
And so the burning question seems to be, why the hell would these guys come back into an industry that’s about as buoyant as an anvil?
We have no growth, no green shoots, we do have however a slide of monumental proportions that still hasn’t stopped steepening.
Our industry could well rewrite the economics books as the most dramatic fall from grace ever documented; we live in hope recovery is around the corner but in the meantime, anybody wishing to invest in our market would do well to unbuckle the straps that pin their arms back in that nice white coat.
Ahhh, ‘therein lies the rub’ as Billy Shakespeare once noted ... it would seem our beloved industry has more than its fair share of admirers inspiring an almost maniacal devotion to duty.
Commentators have suggested these guys mentioned all possess an ego far too large for their own financial good ... but can it be that simple?
Can we really put this resurrection shuffle down to people’s self-image where it demands they return just to cultivate what they believe is something so fleeting as personal fulfilment brought about by other people’s adulation or respect?
My knee jerk is ‘Nah, can’t be, surely not’..... maybe someone as vain as myself could well submit themselves to such indulgence but not these guys.
I will readily concede they would have gotten bored just living off their millions but hey, give me a try, and trust me, you wouldn’t see me for dust .... it could be they need to earn money and after all, paintball is the business they know and so where better?
Let me explain something here, I know these guys pretty well and I also know they ain’t short of a few bucks, far from it ... in fact, f’kin far from it .. if you added their combined wealth together, it would equal the gross yearly turnover of a medium sized African nation and so the likes of Gino and Co ain't gotta work for their living that’s for sure.
I think commonsense is jettisoned pretty quickly when pondering the question of why these guys were so willing to make a comeback but you’d tend to think that maybe the timing of their return is somewhat inappropriate.
I mean, it’s not as if the paintball market is setting the place alight at the moment ... sales are down everywhere across the US and there is little to no investment in our sport from anybody.
These guys are basically using their own money to try and climb back onto the paintball wagon which at the moment has lost a couple of wheels .... one of them being the steering wheel.
Still, it’s their money, they can do with it as they see fit but from the outside, it certainly seems an over-risky endeavour.
I suppose though, we must readily concede these guys are extremely successful if we define success in terms of how much money you have in the bank and maybe, just maybe, they know what they are doing ... it may well come down to perspective, I most certainly view present circumstances in our industry being about as attractive as a baboon’s ass but then again, I’m poor.
It may well be poor people like myself are precluded from seeing opportune times such as these but I’ve yet to be convinced that a 70% reduction in overall sales when compared to 5 years ago, with no recovery in sight, with not one indication the sales down slope has even threatened to level out is a good time to invest ... call me a wussy boy if you like but the signs are there guys, it may well be the time to invest your money in something much less risky such as betting it all on black as a paintball clatters its way around the roulette wheel.
We must remember though, people like Gino, Richmond and the Gardner brothers didn’t get rich by accident, they must have done something right in the past and so it just may be they are smarter than the average bear thus explaining their somewhat curious return.
For my part, I rejoice they have returned, I know Billy, Adam and Richmond pretty well and have gotten on with all of them well enough in the past … they have paintballs in their respective nut-sacks, believe me … they love our sport, and we need them more than they need us, that’s for sure.
I know Richmond and he’s a one-off, he has never lost the ability to keep his feet on the ground … I’m sure he possesses an ego but it never comes across as being oversized and most certainly not too big for his own good, Richmond is proud of what he’s achieved and rightly so, the boy’s done good in my book and he’s a good mate and so you won’t hear a bad word from me.
And like the others, we need Richmond more than he needs us .. of that I am 100% sure.
I don’t really know as Gino well however, for some reason I never really got close to him like I did with the others; as for his character and intentions?
I am not gonna second guess why he has returned or what he’s up to but I do know this, his presence in the marketplace will most certainly shake things up.
He will undoubtedly create a more competitive environment which is good for the customer but I’ve yet to be convinced the pressure to lower prices is all that good for margins especially when the numbers ain’t there. It looks as though he’s squaring up to Kee which as some of you may know is one big mofo and not one I’d like to meet in an industry dark alley somewhere.
Still, Gino must know what he’s doing cos for sure, he’s one smart guy.
The next year or so should be fun for the spectator but I’m not so sure everybody is gonna get out of this fight alive …. Let’s hope this ‘resurrection shuffle’ doesn’t turn out to be an ‘insurrection scuffle’ cos if it does, companies get hurt …
