Amazing company profile today with Turner Return Tops!
Great read with the Sago release just right around the corner!!!
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How did the idea for TRT come about?
A few (several?) years ago now, I met Mark Dhier of Mk1 Yoyos on the r/Throwers Discord channel. One day, he [jokingly?] asked if anyone wanted to help him with quality control and packaging on his second Contact production. Knowing full well that we didn’t live far from each other at the time, I piped up and offered my help! Mark invited my wife and I to his home to help him check ano and package the Contact. He taught us how to check for anodization flaws, vibe, and other important yoyo QC witchcraft. Then, he taught us how to fold boxes, wrap string, and package the yoyos. That evening on the drive home, all we could talk about was how much fun we’d had and how much more realistic it seemed for us to achieve the same. I started conceptualizing the name, logo/trademark, and company mission that evening! I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur with my art, TRT is my artistic outlet.
What does a day in the life look like for you running TRT?
Probably like many others in the boutique yoniverse, TRT is not my fulltime job. In fact, we haven’t even paid ourselves from it. All of our proceeds have either been reinvested into TRT or been invested into the “yommunity” as event sponsorships. I do my best to complete at least one TRT task daily. The busiest time is when we receive a production run and go through our quality control and packaging process. Jess (my wonderful wife) and I typically work on this together, sometimes we have help from the team. It’ll take us between 2 to 3 weeks to test, inspect, package, and inventory a production run. For all the goings on, I work on CAD, graphic design for stickers/pogs/website/packaging/engravings, blog posts for the website, web shop updates, shipping, and some social media. Jess, helps me greatly with TRT. She shares the social media work with me (she runs our TikTok and YouTube, I am the Instagram man) and she is my master of marketing, marketing yoyos to all of our amazing retailers! She also shares the accounting, inventory, and shipping work with me. Some days I just chat with the team and gather feedback on our prototypes or discuss signature designs, we currently have a few in the works. So, it’s kind of a whirlwind on a day-to-day!
Walk me through your creative process
I like to think my process is fairly organic, but I’ve found my groove and have turned it into a routine. When an idea for a yoyo hits, I’ll tend to ponder it for quite awhile before I move into CAD and actually start drawing it. Mark Dhier got me into this line of thinking, and that’s to settle on not just the yoyo design, but what the yoyo design is trying to achieve, what is its purpose? Once all that has been pondered, ideated, dreamt of, discussed, then buried in soft peat for several months before being exhumed and revived, I open Fusion360 and get to work. I gave FreeCAD a try, but I just didn’t gel with the workflow and found myself spending more time figuring out how to draw my line, instead of just drawing my line. I have a handful of bearing seat files that I’ve accumulated and updated over the years, so I don’t redraw those each time anymore, just grab whatever fits the design and save as. If I’m drawing the “next evolution” of an existing design, I’ll start with that file. I draw the right side of the yoyo and always start with my profile. I’ll then draw a “rough” cup and start revolving, checking mass and MOI, and then redrawing/editing until I hit the numbers I’m looking to achieve. Once the math and design looks good, I’ll render it in several different colors, float those out to the team, and then discuss any changes before we move on to prototyping. I do my best to name prototype designs, but we’ve rarely kept the prototype name for any of the actual releases. Once you get that physical creature in your hands and start flowing, the name tends to come a little more naturally. We pass prototypes around the team and I always bring them with me to club meets and events. I like to get the prototypes into as many hands as possible, I value every player’s opinions on them. So, if you ever see my shiny bald head somewhere… you should definitely bother me because I want to know what you think about my prototype! After a few months of play testing, we decide whether or not to make changes and/or proceed with quoting a production run. If the numbers line up, we pick our pantones and cut the check! Once yoyos are ordered, which is typically the longest lead time, we start ordering all of the other important accoutrements that the modern yoyoist should expect. Strings have come from Zipline for every one of our independent releases, and I intend to keep it that way! Jeremy has been amazing to work with and I truly respect what he’s doing. I admire his passion for yoyo and am always elated to get huge bundles of his glorious string! I have a self-proclaimed Pog Smith out in Nevada, this guy is the real deal! Check him out, custompogs.com. Stickers get ordered from whoever has the best deal going, I haven’t married any of these print shops, yet. Last but not least, there’s the model specific stamp for the boxes. Speaking of gift boxes, this upcoming model will be the last TRT release in our hand stamped gift boxes… we’ve been cooking something quality over the last several months to enhance our yo-experience.
What’s your favorite memory running TRT?
Oi, there’s so many! How can I pick only one? If I have to pick, though, it’s gotta be this last US Nationals out in Philadelphia. This was my first time at a Nationals event and it was simply wild! I got to meet so many more faces of yo, learned new tricks, and picked up some excellent new yoyos, along with getting to catch up with several familiar faces of yo, too! We even had a couple kids running around with our Scrub yoyos, getting them signed like they were team signed baseballs. One kid kept coming up to our table to show me the latest signature, then I’d point out another famous player and he’d run off to meet them. There were so many kids buzzing about the Scrub that Mark D. coined the term “Scrubonites” that weekend to describe our band of followers. The most adorable was this little girl who made it her mission to not only get signatures on her yoyo, but she also had to collect one of each of our pogs! This was so cool to me, because our pogs are all limited edition and this was the first time someone told me they were actually collecting them! Funniest part about that little girl, was that she didn’t realize who I was until the end of the event. She thought I was just some guy working the table, not the actual yoyo designing human. When she was told, the look on her face was priceless! We also made the final decision to offer sponsorship to Adam Reeder during this event, and we’re beyond elated to have him on the team. Oh, and Eric’s DNA on weird things contest was a riot! I almost had it on that big ol’ Brontosaurus!
What’s your favorite release to date?
Tough call between the Bathysphere and Cenote. Bathysphere is incredibly special to me, being our first collaboration and our largest/most popular release to date. This was also the first time I really worked on custom packaging, which was a ton of work, but the results were more than worth it. I hope Mark and I get to work together on another collaboration one day! Cenote is our next most popular, numbers wise. We took our biggest financial risk to date with the second run, and it was either going to make us or break us. Working with our favorite tattoo artist and friend, Vanessa Harper, we had so much fun creating the limited art series. I also got to share Cenote with so many great players at Nats, hearing their overwhelmingly positive feedback on it was incredible. The most amazing thing about Cenote, though, was that my favorite player gave it a rave review on his Youtube channel, thank you Takatsu-san!!! I could have probably died happy that day, talk about a yo-chievment that I never had though about before and that has been so important to me. All that said, I think it’s the Cenote!
What’s your next release and why should we be excited for it?
Our next release is coming up Friday, March 28th… it’s the Sago!!! This is our first bimetal yoyo, and it is an absolute banger. Just say go, because Sago simply exudes speed, stability, and fun to the max. There’s a ton of comp focused bimetals out there, and in my experience most play the same way, Sago is different. Despite being incredibly rim weighted, the overall weight of the design allows for easy and fast directional changes. However, if you really just like ridiculously powerful yoyos, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a special edition of the Sago with heavier brass rims included with this release, the King Sago! Oh, and… oh my sweet goodness gracious… this release also includes our first ever Unknown collaborative edition! Hyyype!!!
What’s in store for TRT in the future?
When we first started, my goal was to have our yoyos retail at YoYoExpert and in Japan. Those were my two biggest milestones and what seemed impossible at the time. I feel like we’ve finally made a name for ourselves and cemented our spot in the yommunity, and having achieved my original dream goals… I’ve been working on a larger list! Most recently, we embarked on the journey of custom packaging for all of our future releases. Manufacturing recently finished and they’re on their way across the Pacific, we’re expecting them to arrive in time for our next-next release. Speaking of, I hope y’all like turtles as much as we do! We’re also planning our first crowd-funded release, which will also be our first tug-responsive model. And my current ultimate goal, apart from making TRT my full time job, is to make $5 yoyos. I had a dream that I walked into our local Target… and there it was, on the shelf right next to the Duncan yoyos, a selection of Turner Return Tops! So, probably not in the next 3 years, but maybe in the next 7 to 10 years I want to journey into injection molding and worldwide retail. Maybe after that I’ll have to get one of our yoyos launched into space or something, but right now that’s the biggest dream I’ve dreamt!
If you could go back and do one thing differently what would that be?
Easy. I’d have done the Buoy! very differently. I ordered too many prototypes, with fancy expensive anodization, and we ordered way too many for production! Being a nobody from nowhere as a new boutique company was way more difficult to perpetuate than I could have ever anticipated. I oftentimes wonder if we’d have been better off as a mystery company with no face reveal! I also would have reached out to retailers first, before trying to direct release on our own. That hindered our growth early on, thinking we’d somehow just sell 100+ Buoy!'s direct was beyond foolish. I know now that retail sales are even more important than our direct sales. By a large margin. Our retailers bring our products to more people than we could ever hope to reach via social media and forums, apart from all of the good they do for our yommunity in their own unique ways!
What do you think sets your company apart from others?
I think we have a few things going for us that sets apart from most. We have consistently manufactured with FPM, which we believe produces the highest quality for the cost. We also really enjoy working with Wendy, you rock! Including quality accessories is certainly not unique in the yoniverse either, but again, we consistently include Zipline strings with each release because they are the best in the world. I could buy bulk bags of poly string at cost for way less, but I love Zipline strings and I’m pretty sure most of you do, too! Have I mentioned our limited edition pogs? I love collecting things, not just yoyos. So, including fun things like the pogs brings me a ton of joy. All of this, and I believe we maintain a relatively low price for what we offer. Apart from quality tops & accessories for reasonable prices, I believe our tops generally follow the same philosophy of fun. Our designs mostly revolve around lighter than average overall weights and I always focus on achieving this magical “float” feeling on strings. Competition is important, the latest meta is fire, but those are not the only facets to the hobby. We’ll continue to do our best to keep it fun, that I can guarantee!
Any advice to aspiring companies/creators?
This is the best advice that I have the most difficult time following: plan it all in advance. Spend a few more weeks tweaking that drawing, show it to a trusted yo-gineer with experience for help. Their feedback will be invaluable! Or hire someone to draw your CAD if you aren’t the technical type. Order the MOQ (minimum order quantity) with either solid color ano or raw to save money on prototypes. Play and share those prototypes for at least 3 if not 6 months. Plan the theme, name, art, accessories, packaging, advertising, and marketing before you order that production run. Reach out to retailers with renderings to gauge interest in the design prior to production, too. Don’t forget shipping supplies! Oh yeah, and plan out where you’re going to layout your hundreds of yoyos to do quality control, inspections, packaging and then storage. I’m always trying to re-organize my yo-storage!
