Little equipment produced today is actually new or improved, save a few things. Most gear is molded plastic with 5-20000% production cost markup at retail, often shipped by those who don't actually make or even design anything and simply re-market logo-slapped colors or lines for nominal slave labor factories. There's an abundance of unwanted new or lightly used equipment for cheap or almost free that's otherwise landfill-bound. Price point—rather than experimental high-performance equipment—is necessarily produced to maximize revenue. The capital outlay for a truly new design dwarfs investment for a minimum run of open mold plastic with ...

Wherein :

1. Valo, an imprint of Roces, "secretly" marketed skinned skates as blader-owned

2. ThemSkates, formerly Valo and now really a blader-owned company, markets unskinned skates

3. Buying a skate is then mistaken for buying a stake

4. One downloads and produces "DIY" marketing materials using the official Valo vector logo artwork