And here we go…

After years of deciding if we should go through with it, we took the plunge. This blog post is the first of (hopefully) many, but also serves to let you know about us, and why we think we’re different.

Our company values are quality, transparency and fairness. Perfectionists by nature, we cannot put our name on something that we ourselves wouldn’t accept for our own items, no matter the effort needed to do it right. As an example, a spray gun shot a small blob of paint on a lower receiver, and instead of just the redoing the receiver, we redid the entire AR. Why? Because that’s the only way to make sure all the parts perfectly matched in color and sheen. Was it overboard? Maybe, but it came out right. A quality job in the end, and that’s what matters.

As to transparency, you can expect us to overcommunicate our process, our tools, and most importantly, our skills. There are many shops out there that turn out absolutely beautiful custom airbrushed jobs, full of shadows and depth. This isn’t one of those shops because we have not built up those skills yet. We’ll get there someday, but until there, if you contact us with a request we don’t think we can do to perfection, we’ll give you two options:

  • Send us the parts and let us try our hand at doing it, free of charge to you.
  • Recommend one of several shops (Roman Arms, Branson Cerakote) we think can do the job to the standards we’d expect from ourselves.

And finally fairness. When we’ve shared our pricing structure with people, we have received three types of responses:

  • Those prices are too good to be true, what’s the deal?
  • You are selling yourself/your skills short.
  • Shut up and take my money.

Leveraging our value of transparency, this is not our livelihood. This is hobby turned side-business, and as such, we don’t need to make as much money as possible to survive. As long as we cover our costs of materials, equipment, insurance, fees to the ATF and our hosting provider, etc., we’re happy. The material costs to spray a pistol are $10-20 depending on the ask. As such, the markup over job cost that some shops charge is staggering. If you are getting an airbrushed custom job, then you are paying for someone’s skill, and you have to decide if their skill is worth that cost. But if you are getting a single color sprayed on a slide or a receiver, what are you really paying for? There is little skill in such a job. Therefore, the cost is pure markup. We do not think that is fair to a customer, hence our lower pricing structure.

All that said, we hope to talk with you soon, for many years to come, and somewhere in there, do some quality work for you that makes you happy to show off to your friends and family.