New Epic Production in China

I’ve been neglecting my blog as nearly all of my energy over the past several months has gone into moving our production. There have been a lot of rumors about what is happening and here I’ll set the record straight.

I’m happy to announce that our new state of the art facility in China is up and going. We’ve already sent out 2 boat shipments and filled several paddle orders from our new factory.

Our Building

Our building is brand new with 10,000 square meters (100,000 square ft) of space over 2 floors. We’ve outfitted it with climate controlled laminating rooms, high capacity vacuum pumps, a CNC shaping machine and a large curing oven.

Our Company

Hangzhou Epic Boat Co., Ltd is registered as a foreign enterprise in China. So we are now in control of production and expect greatly improved quality. Dave Kruger, with 30 years experience in the composites industry, is in China overseeing our production. We have several staff from our former facility that elected to move with us to our new location, plus new employees are continually being hired and trained.

Our Models

All paddle models are already in production at our new factory. We’ve rebuilt our kayak moulds and have 4 models currently in production with another 4 coming on line before the end of March and even more in April. We currently have boats in stock in USA and Europe for most of our models. We anticipate being able to fill all orders this spring and summer.

Our R&D department has not stopped either. Be sure to check our site later in March for some exciting announcements!

Our Lawsuit

The last 6 months have been very busy and very difficult for me. Once we decided to move our production to a new facility, Flying Eagle (our former producer) took every opportunity to make it difficult for us. They’ve essentially been holding our moulds, equipment, materials and finished product hostage – demanding that we pay excessive fees (hundreds of thousands of US $) and agree to unreasonable business restrictions (with penalties up to US $1 million if we don’t comply with their demands) as a condition of releasing our goods.

Since Flying Eagle said we must sign the lopsided agreement if we wanted to avoid court, it left us with no option but to file a lawsuit against Flying Eagle in China. Our case is very strong and we hope it will be reviewed and ruled fairly by Chinese officials. Check back later this year to see how it goes.

Regardless, we realized that we couldn’t allow the deceitful negotiations and stalling tactics by Flying Eagle to interrupt our production. We therefore decided to rebuild all of our moulds and tooling in the new facility. We’ve made great progress and I’m proud of our staff in China the way they’ve stepped up to get us back in production.

In the meantime, we appreciate all the support that we’ve received from others. Several Charleston area businessmen called in after an article on our plight ran in the Charleston Post & Courier. Senator DeMint’s staff was helpful in guiding us to other resources.

Looking Ahead

Now it’s time to get back on the water. I look forward to the upcoming paddling season introducing many more exciting things over the coming months and years!