Here’s our new grind menu. Those of you with good sleuthing skills will probably detect through your powers of observation that it’s the same as our old grind menu. What gives? What happened to all the talk of new grinds?
We’ve decided not to put any new structures on the menu for this season. It’s not because we don’t have good new structures; we have some excellent new stuff and we’re really excited about it. There are two reasons we’re not adding it to the menu.
1 – The new structures don’t just replace any individual grinds from the old menu. They overlap existing structure in less than neat ways, and so we’d have to add options. Many of our customers already struggle with too many options. For the sake of people who don’t want to have a long conversation, we want to keep things relatively contained.
2 – The new structures are difficult to produce, and they take much longer. Many of the new grinds are built on the same concept, and they depend on modifications to two different systems on the grinder in order to be reliably reproduced. To make large quantities of these grinds would take much longer than we spend on the standard structures, and we’d have to charge more money for them. The problem then is that customers start making choices based on price – they have to weigh a value equation rather than just select the best grind for their purposes. That’s a bad way to make decisions, and we really don’t want to have a multi-tiered pricing structure.
We’re heading into the season with an ambitious testing program. In another week we’ll be sending test skis with the grind line-up to the right up to Anchorage for Erik Mundahl to test at Hatcher Pass when they received snow (several inches are in the current forecast, though it’s a little early to expect it to stay). Last year Erik gave us some of our best feedback on the new TG1 series grinds (as well as hfC15 liquid) in early testing at Hatcher. The good early test information gives us a jump on setting up our follow-up testing. All of the grinds in Erik’s test have been on snow in one form or another. Eight of the twelve have been used in either World Cup or Olympic competition. Only the TB1 and TB2 variations have undergone meaningful revision since last year’s testing. We’ve got a bunch of additional concepts to pursue through the season.
By next season we’re planning to have a fully revised structure menu – something that can be boiled down to relatively few well-proven and robust structures. In the meantime, we’re happy to send out new structures at our regular prices to anybody who wants to try them. And by the time we’ve got the new menu established, we’ll be on our way to a whole bunch of new stuff…
Which begs the question why. Why do we feel the need to reinvent our structures all the time? After all, many reputable grinders have been producing the same grinds for over a decade with good success. Well, mostly it’s because this line of work is interesting because it gives us the opportunity for continual reexamination of our assumptions. What I think I know today is likely to be challenged by tomorrow’s experiences.
There are two ways to be able to say, with conviction, that you’re doing the best you can. One is to select evidence that “proves” that you’re perfect just the way you are. The other is to constantly try to prove your assumptions wrong, and then to strive to improve on them. We’ll never promise that we’ve got the best grinds, but we can certainly promise that we’re working hard to improve our work all the time. And in the end, that’s why this is still interesting after a dozen years. So the simple answer to the question of why we keep changing things up is that it keeps all of this fun. It’s important for us to be excited about the work we put out. Can you imagine standing in front of the grinder doing the same exact thing for over ten years? Ugh.