pdebakker

Grin, no worries... I have , on many occasions, been thinking the same thing.. . Nothing was said out of line as far as I am concerned but it did make clear that some info straight from the source may be appreciated. Thank you for the kind words. There are few things I like more than developing a kite and watching someone have fun with it. I have gone through big personal and professional changes in the last three years so designing new kites has been on the back burner for a bit. Planning on getting my "Focus" back on developing kites though...

Good to hear the Manta is being eagerly anticipated!! (or at least anticipated ) I just thought I'd jump on here to explain the time line and what has happened between "Focus" and now. Apologies for contributing to the hijack of the thread. Someone mentioned Focus' announcement of the transition in production in 2010. Although this was true, it wasn't Into the Wind we were talking about at the time. I had the chance to move to the West Coast in mid-2010, following a great job offer. Since this was going to physically split up Focus (Hunter was and is firmly based in Wilmington, NC), we decided to look for an alternative way of building our kites. We were going to have the sails made in the USA by a third party, known for their top-notch quality, with me finishing them and QC-ing them in the Pac-NW. Our collaboration with this 3rd party was the worst, most unprofessional business relationship I have ever had the displeasure being in and it took us a full year of prototyping, missed deadlines, price negotiations & re-negotiations, and more missed deadlines by the vendor, to figure out that we couldn't make Focus work this way. So it's mid 2011 now, and we couldn't get US production started, plus we had not been able to deliver for about a year. Hunter and I decided to officially stop Focus and left it at him keeping rights to the name and logo for possible future use and me keeping the rights to the kites I designed. A couple of kite manufacturers contacted me about those designs and I choose ITW for their customer service and quality control, they WILL stand by their product. Now I only had a couple of months to change graphics and get kites production ready for early 2012 delivery. The first kites chosen by ITW were Skate, Hydra and Echo. Depending on how the Skate would do, they would consider adding the Manta for the next production year, 2013. So that, in a nutshell, is the explanation behind the 3 year hiatus. On a related note, coming full circle, I have been working on new designs and with a new partner, am working on preparing the launch of a new brand. more to come soon...