We are very happy to report that once again we have the pleasure of carrying Viking pool cues. As many of you know, Viking hit a rough patch last year and ceased operations, but on May 14th the company resumed operations under the leadership of Wisconsin businessman Mark Larson.
For years, Viking has been one of our top selling brands, so we were all obviously quite excited to hear that the company had re-opened. We just got a large batch of Viking cues back in stock which have been inspected and are ready to ship. As of now, we’re carrying 23 models from their line (we have 13 in stock right now) and look forward to eventually bringing the entire line back in the coming months.
Be sure to check out our new, in stock cues and welcome back Viking!
I’ve alluded to this over the past few weeks in emails and on Twitter, but here are the details. Next week at the BCAPL tournament, a significant portion of our booth will be taken up by a pool table and a wheel of fortune.
We’re going to be running this all day, every day so we’ll be giving away a ton of stuff throughout the show. The only time we won’t be running the wheel is when our pal Jennifer Barretta stops by to play some challenge matches. I believe she’ll be hanging with us for a bit on the 15th, the 16th and the 17th and I’m pretty sure that if you manage to beat Ms. Barretta, you’ll be getting a prize as well.
As for the Wheel of Fortune, here’s the deal. There are eight different games on the wheel. You spin, you play and if you win the game, you win some sweet PoolDawg swag or a gift certificate. Best of all, it’s free! We decided that we want to have some fun at this event, so instead of grinding through 12-14 hours of sales per day, we’re just gonna give stuff away.
Bargain shoppers, fear not! We’re also bringing over 100 pool cues with us that we’ll be selling for way less than we should. They’ll be reworks, samples and seconds, so the savings will be pretty substantial.
That’s all for now. Just remember, when you’re out in Vegas look for this sign and stop by for a spin!
Every now and again, we’ll have a situation where we get a product back in less than tip-top shape. Now we could just toss these damaged items in the garbage, but we’re far too curious for that. Needless to say, when a cracked McDermott G-Core shaft came to us, I decided to see what’s inside.
Before you look at these pictures, try to keep in mind that I haven’t whittled since I was a kid at Jameson Ranch Camp and that I’m working with a box cutter instead of a nice Bowie knife.
Once I was able to carve off the maple, I found some interesting stuff underneath. According to McDermott’s official description of the shaft, it is constructed with three layers: wood, carbon fiber and wood. This is in fact what I found.
The top layer is hard rock maple, with a piece of darker wood covered by a thin layer of carbon fiber between the two. Not sure what kind of wood that inner core is made of, but it is there.
The idea behind the construction is that the multi-layer design reduces vibration, which then leads to better control. I know, I know. I could’ve just gone to their website and looked at the description, but this way was much more fun. Plus, isn’t it nice to know that when a company says they build something a specific way, they actually do?
I’m gonna have to find more stuff to deconstruct, because this one was pretty entertaining.
As I’m sure many of you have noticed, there are certain products that pretty much every online store sells at the exact same price. Despite what some may think, we do not all get together and conspire on prices. Most manufacturers in the billiards industry have what are commonly referred to as Minimum Advertised Pricing policies or MAP for short.
In essence, manufacturers tell retailers that they can only advertise certain products at specific minimum prices. For example, if you look at the Predator IKON series, you’ll notice that every IKON is priced at 15% off MSRP, down to the penny.
At the time of this writing, we have the IKON 2 priced at $551.65, which is exactly 15% off the MSRP of $649.00. If you shop around, you’ll likely find that every authorized dealer has the same pool cue priced no lower than $551.65 as well (the key word here is authorized, as I’m sure there are some unauthorized, unscrupulous dealers that violate MAP).
Another example of this is with Aramith products. Recently, Aramith instituted a 20% MAP policy, so all Aramith pool balls are now priced at 20% off down to the penny.
As retailers, we are required to follow these policies as a condition of selling a manufacturer’s products. If we habitually advertise Aramith products under MAP, we will be cut off and won’t be able to carry those products any more.
The concept of MAP is not exclusive to the billiards industry. Almost every industry has manufacturers that enforce MAP policies. When I worked in the toy business, Disney, Mattel and pretty much every other manufacturer I worked with had MAP policies in place. Same went for the video game business when I was doing that. We would get a list of prices from companies like Activision and Electronic Arts telling us what our minimum advertised prices would be.
This is a policy that isn’t always popular with retailers and customers, as it limits the amount a product can be discounted. That being said, it is a standard part of retail and is beyond our control. Having worked on both sides (as I worked for a supplement manufacturer in a previous life), I personally understand all the pros and cons of this sort of program. I personally don’t have any issues with it, but can understand why others might.
So now you know why pool cues are always marked at 20% off. And as GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle. 
It was quite an interesting day yesterday at PoolDawg’s worldwide headquarters. I was roused out of a peaceful slumber early yesterday morning by an automated text saying the PoolDawg’s servers were down. After a little research, we were able to determine that our host, the powerful Amazon EC2 Cloud service, had what the press is referring to as “a hiccup“.
Like many online companies, PoolDawg is hosted in what is commonly referred to as a cloud server environment. Among the folks that live in our cloud are Reddit, Quora, Foursquare, Hootsuite and a ton of other companies. The reasons to do it are scalability, reliability and it is much more affordable than some of the other hosting options that provide 99.95% uptime. This of course is the irony of the story, as the cloud went down making our site unreachable for a good part of the day yesterday.
Needless to say, our technology partners at Acumium were able to get us back up and running without any loss of data. That said, I’d like to apologize to all of our loyal customers who weren’t able to get anything more than a system maintenance page yesterday. We’re already in the process of looking at options to put redundancy in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
Thank you to everyone for your patience yesterday. If anyone has any questions about this, feel free to email me directly at mike[at]pooldawg.com or just give us a call at 866-843-3294.
Over the past year or so, we’ve had a number of requests to carry Blue Diamond chalk. This is the stuff that Longoni has made which sells for around 7 bucks for two cubes. It’s really popular with competitive players and tons of people swear by it, including my good buddy Samm Diep.
The reason I’ve been dragging my feet on carrying the chalk is the price. We’ve sold silver cup chalk and master chalk forever at $4.95 for 12 pieces, so when I heard that that we’d have to sell this stuff for $3.50 per cube, I was skeptical. Mind you not as skeptical about it as the $25 per cube Kamui chalk, but skeptical nonetheless.
In the end though, it is up to the customers to decide. Just like with every product we carry, if it sells, we’ll keep it in the mix. If not, we’ll take it down. I must say though that the first 24 hours have been promising, as we’ve already sold through a nice amount of this stuff with very little promotion. We’ll see how it goes.
