 | | | | | | | | | | | Do you find that word-of-mouth is the best advertising?
Bruce: Oh by far, yeah. I mean, if you can sell a suit to somebody and they'll say 'this is great' and then ten of his pals buy it then that's way better then someone looking at a magazine article and saying 'well I kinda like that, but I don't know what it'll be like.' So yeah, word-of-mouth is the best advertising anyone can get for their business.
So how long did it take from...[noticing the birthday cake on the counter and laughing]..whose birthday is it?
Bruce: It's mine!
Mark: 50 today.
Bruce: And I don't look a year older.
How long did it take you to get your first wetsuit designed, made and shipped out?
Mark: The best part of a year really.
Bruce: Yeah, over a year to get the first thing back into our hands as such for us to sell.
What was the hardest part of making it?
Mark: Just learning how to design things for manufacture, and overcoming difficulties in communication with what I wanted made and what the factory would actually make. So we went round that loop a few times before we really learned well how to design something for manufacture.
Do you designed everything from scratch that you put your own label on?
Mark: Pretty much, yeah. Particularly the wetsuits. Some of the moulded products we license from other people, like clips and things. But all our main line of wetsuits, buoyancy aides, cagoules and spray-decks are all our own designs.
Do you think you'll ever get to the point where you'll be manufacturing your own stuff as well as designing it?
Mark: Well none of the big brands have their own factories any more, it's an inefficient way to manufacture. So we manufacture in the same way as the biggest brands, we outsource our manufacturing to some of the best contract manufacturers in the world and they make up our designs for us in the same way as they make up all the big brand's designs.
Do you make an effort to use any Scottish or UK-based companies for the manufacturing?
Mark: No. There's two things: first of all, the cost of manufacture prohibits anyone from making these kind of products in Scotland or in the UK. You won't find anyone doing it any more. And the few that started off doing it are all now moving their manufacturing abroad, which is an unfortunate situation, because when we started out, we did do all our costings based on British manufacture, but it just wasn't viable. The second thing is that so many skills have been lost in textile production that it's quite difficult to get hold of companies with the right fabrication machinery to make some of the complicated stitching that we do.
Bruce: I think that people appreciate that certain things come from different parts of the world, like computers come from Japan and so on. And with watersports products, they know where things are made.
What would you say are the best and worst things about owning and running your own business?
Mark: I guess you never get a proper day off.
Bruce: Yeah.
Mark: You're always kind of on call for something happening.
Bruce: It's longer hours but you don't mind doing the hours because it's for yourself. Before you we were working 12, 13, 14 hour days but in the end it was for another company, and you're doing the best you can but the recognition was going to that company. But now we're doing it all for ourselves and we get the feedback and the good times.
Mark: Quite a few days we'll spend product testing as well, so you'll take days off during the week to go up to Loch Lomond or wherever it might be and test your kit out doing whatever sport. So you get to spend a lot of time working with the whole community and with other people. Like we do a lot of work with the outdoor centres - we supply about half of the outdoor centres in Scotland now with all their wetsuits, so we go and test it doing various activities - go gorge walking, white water rafting, whatever. So that's good fun.
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