So as much as everyone loves smaller brands, how much do you think they contribute to yoyo design innovation long term? It seems to me that most of them tend to just produce either what is currently popular in the market or just safe designs in general. They just don’t have means to take risks in design and have them not work out.
This is great in producing more choice for the consumer, as there is a lot of variance among the popular designs at the time, so you may like a given type of design but want it at a specific height, width and weight, which you can probably find with the amount of options we have. But from the view of taking risks in order to further yo-yo design it’s less feasible for smaller companies to do this.
I definitely see where on the surface, a smaller company likely has more financial limitations, and therefore can’t afford to take as big of risks on things, or maybe can’t afford to make a bunch of prototypes to try and make a radical design work. However, all most of these “bigger” companies now (YYF, CLYW, OD) started out as one of those small companies, and came out with yoyos that made massive impacts on design moving forward.
As for a current smaller company, the Burm from Retic comes to mind. This is a MASSIVE organic yoyo, I think its like 70g, but plays like it’s 60g, and is easily the most fun, casual throw I have in my collection. I remember when I met Neil at ECM he said at first the machine shop wouldn’t even do the design, because they didn’t think it would work.
Care to elaborate? I really don’t see more than 1 or 2 smaller brands making anything exceptionally unique or innovative, and even then there might be one yoyo in their lineup that does so. Lots of stuff that rides current design trends or just is a safe design overall. V shape bi metals, 54-56 mm height with 44-46 mm width, bell or slight hybrid v and w shape with huge catch zones.
Edit: just want to clarify this is in no way an indictment of smaller brands and just a discussion. I personally don’t even like most of the “unique” designs that come out and I think it’s great that the consumer has so much choice right now. I just think those risky, different designs serve a purpose of expanding what we see as possible and recognize that it’s not in the financial interest of a company to take a risk making something that may not have any appeal.
Most things A-RT are a bit different. The Rericulated Return Tops Burm looks very interesting and unconventional. The Old School Throws Resto is quite different too.
It’s definitely interesting to see what small new companies run by people just trying out yoyo design for fun put out, but I always wonder what negative effect it has in taking away revenue from the bigger companies, being smaller they have less disposable to give back to sponsoring contests and running external programs to promote yoyo.
That being said I think the few customers that opt to buy some other so called “boutique” small brand don’t make up a significant portion of their sales, I imagine much of it comes from people who don’t yoyo at all that see YYF or Duncan products in a toy store.
Of course this is largely speculation, don’t mean to offend anyone but I’ve always wondered if it “damages” the larger companies in any way.
I think it would a lot more riskier to try their hand at the norm. Everyone does the norm, and they would just add more average looking yoyos into the mix.
Imagine if a brand new company releases a V shaped aluminium/SS bimetal with very safe specs. Good luck, they’ll have to market the absolute crap out of that to get anywhere at all.
I don’t think the kind of yoyo even matters. Marketing is everything. If you now how to advertise a standard comp v shape yoyo (which is not really the norm but whatever) and you know how to market it, it will do well. If you come up with a good idea, but you have no marketing strategy, it ain’t gonna work.
I have a lot of thoughts about this. There’s a number of really interesting non-standard yoyos that have come out from smaller companies in the past year or so. Here’s a couple that haven’t been mentioned:
Smashing Crucible. 50 grams, pure O shape. The shape isn’t unusual (though it’s pleasant) and all the rest of the specs are completely in line with a standard yo-yo of that shape. I like the Crucible a lot. My impression though is that it was not anywhere close to the most popular Smashing release (which I believe is the Monocle, then maybe the Float after it).
Smashing Float. V-shaped, slightly over-diameter ~60g. Really cool yo-yo that meets all the standard specs, except it’s missing about 5 grams. Aesthetically really nice, and I think one of the factors that made it successful was the link to Andrew Bergen and Scales.
Freshly Dirty x Radical Seas Canary. Undersized, D-sized bearing. It also has a pretty interesting step-flare shape. Cool players helped a lot in its cool marketing.
Ya-na-si-yoyo Scissortail. This thing is on the verge of oversized, has a really swoopy profile, and an interesting fingerspin protrusion thing. Dunno much about it other than that, however.
Petri Dish. A project by Heshgod Enterprrises, it’s a super slim mega high wall flat cup unresponsive. It is 63.25mm in diameter, 27.95mm wide and 60.5 grams. Not sure anyone’s made anything quite like this before.
There’s no way I can tell if these seemed risky to their designers BEFORE seeing how well they did afterwards, but in hindsight I think they were all successful projects. I think the driving force behind all the really successful ones is having a cool person/cool people attached to the project, promoting it actively.
For my first yoyo I definitely felt like I had to do a mostly all-arounder yo-yo, though I did experiment with the fingerspin cup and ended up with something successful for that. It’s a small thing but I was sweating over it for a long time for my first release. Now that I have a baseline I feel a little better about making more unusual things.
How much am I contributing long-term? Maybe not a lot to design… but I got a bunch of my friends into yo-yoing, so that’s cool. I designed a pretty neat crochet pouch for yo-yos. I’ve been helping teach people how to do their own CAD.
This would be hard to measure. Like, my sales volume is super low. Even if I haven’t been sponsoring things and teaching brand new players how to yo-yo, I don’t think anything I’ve impacted has done anything that Duncan would be able to measure on their bottom line, it’d get lost in the noise of monthly sales. It’s probably more likely that smaller companies mostly compete with other smaller companies (or maybe we’re all helping each other behind the scenes!)
I don’t mean to suggest smaller brands aren’t contributing to the community, just that I was skeptical of how much they are able to in terms of design innovation long term. Just wanted to clarify because I don’t want to appear like I don’t value their existence at all.
I think small brands are almost more able to innovate. Bigger brands have more to worry about in terms of satisfying a fan base. CLYW has a very clearly defined ‘style’ to their yoyos. Having said that, Yoyofactory makes weird stuff pretty regularily, so it’s pretty much an open market for that.
I can see this argument for super small runs, and you were one of the 2 brands I was thinking of above that does some different stuff, but what happens if a smaller brand makes a decent size run of a risky design and it just flops? Is that loss significant to the company? Can they do a sale at just above cost and recoup the investment and be good to go again?
And I’m completely willing to accept if I’ve made some false assumptions in this thread, it was just something i thought merited discussion. I clearly have no experience and am speaking completely as a consumer.
How are we defining “smaller yoyo companies” here? Is it just Duncan & YYF vs everyone else? Is One Drop a smaller company?
I think you see both sides of the spectrum when it comes to designs, both from large, established companies and from smaller, newer companies. The Smashing Float, Sengoku ERCIM and Samurai, OD 1to1—just to make a few off the top of my head—all do something a bit different and non-meta. Whereas you see YoYos like the YYF Singularity or a lot of Duncan’s bimetals that are all excellent and often aggressively priced yoyos but don’t really push boundaries so much as refine and hone really solid but conventional designs.
In terms of sapping money out of the yoyo community, I don’t really see this being the case. A lot of smaller companies sponsor players. One Drop, G2, OhYesYo, UNDPRLD, Smashing back in its day, etc all sponsor players and contests. Meanwhile, there are initiatives like the Boutique YoYo Collective that aggregate the funds of small companies to sponsor contests. Hell, Jeremy of Rain City Skills sponsors and runs Canadian Nats if I’m not mistaken.
I really think that the perception that smaller boutique or upstart companies don’t innovate or don’t give back to the community is just that—perception only—and I guess I don’t understand why. I get feeling like they need to prove themselves more since they’re less established but in terms of putting out interesting designs and supporting the community, most seem to do so as much as they can. So why the higher bar of entry for them?
As someone else said, G2 and YYF were the small upstarts back in their day. I’m awfully glad they got to stick around and sit at the grown ups table.
