Frag Out! Magazine

Are you personally involved in developing new tools or modifications of the existing models or Your colleagues engineers are engaged in it? Now we hire designers who act much more quicker than me some time ago. Ben Riviera, who developed the best of our tools, is the most important person and a star in the world of designers. Many tools from the offer after some time are assigned a "retire" status – withdrawn form manu- facturing. However, an old Crunch model is still in the offer and noth- ing has been changed in it so far. What is the reason? A substantial reason to withdraw a tool from our offer is a development of the new, the latest one. Some of them, simply, sell worse so they are re- jected. Selling of the Crunch is still stable, per- haps not great, but constant. How does a process of an innovation implementation in the existing prod- ucts look like? You come up with an idea, for instance of a new version of the Wave, and then further and fur- ther or is it just better to develop a new tool? It seems to me that we must apply both manners. Some products are an evolution of the previous model with a small modifications – many of them is a realization of expectations of our customers. We also must consider that a world around us still changes and we introduce in our tools solutions and functions which enable to solve problems of the modern world. Will it always be slightly less space for the further product modifica- tions? Certainly. We think that we will implement some elec- tronic circuits soon. Real hardware? Yes. I will quote here a story of Aron Rolston (his story is told in the "127 Hours" movie), who has crashed his hand with a stone during a lone- ly climbing a stone – the only manner to save his life has been an amputation. Then, he has described it in his autobiography how he had managed to do it using a tool which he had re- ceived as a gratis to the purchased flashlight. The Chinese blade has been very poor when it comes to cutting. After this accident he came to us and we have presented to us a multitool. I tell it since the entire event would never took place, if a tool had included an electronic circuit like a beacon which can be triggered in the critical situation when a help is needed. Maybe, he would not lost his hand then? Let's come back to counterfeits: not to the construction solutions, but counterfeits of Your products. Is it now a great problem? Well, that's good that this statement has been used. Personally, I divide a market for those who are a competition and those who counterfeit in a cheeky manner. There are the Chinese counter- feits of our products, but their quality is poor. One we had tried to solve these problems in a legal manner, but after some time I have realized that a presence of these counterfeits help us. People purchase them, but finally choose our products with 25-year warranty. www.fragoutmag.com

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