April was a mess in the good way. We had a small booth at a fair up in Ningbo and a sander chose that exact week to give up. Of course it did.
The sander is the old belt one we've had since maybe 2017. It's slow and loud and we keep saying we'll replace it, then we don't. When it died we lost half a day moving everything onto the smaller backup, which is fine for samples but crawls on volume.
For the fair Eva and I packed about 200 paddles, a mix of beech, a few poplar kids sets, and some printed OEM samples so people could see the logo quality. The printed ones always get picked up first, buyers love to rub their thumb over the face to feel if the print is raised.
Best conversation of the fair was a Greek importer who didn't buy anything but spent twenty minutes telling me how his customers grip the paddle. That kind of thing is worth more than an order honestly, it tells us what to tweak.
We also met two buyers who'd only ever bought from bigger factories and were tired of 5,000-piece minimums. That's our whole pitch really, smaller runs and you talk to a real person. One of them is sampling with us now.
Back at the workshop the sander got fixed Thursday by the same repair guy who's been keeping it alive for years. He just shook his head at it. I think we both know we're buying a new one this year, for real this time.
Nothing dramatic, just a normal busy spring. Wood, leather, balls, repeat. If you came by the booth and we talked, drop a line through the chat and remind me which paddle you liked, I probably wrote it down somewhere.
