DONE! Finally! We just got the new Shopping Cart working and added some new stuff to the site. There’s more to come but at the least the platform is programmed. Hop on over to the new Store and see if you can use some new hardware.
We Had Nothing To Do With It
“Addressing Churchill on Reddit” (BTW: We love you komsire22)
It seems too many of you are posting about us on reddit. And fellow redditors are getting tired of it. We had NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT. We do not spam or even know how to. Now let me just send out a big, FUCKING, THANK YOU, to all those that have taken their time to answer questions and post on their own. We’ve made some really good friends on there. Churchill is not a huge brand and we won’t be, don’t worry. If there is a trend, like some say on reddit, it will surely die off. This website sells PLAIN NATURAL decks and we get a ton of shit for it. The whole industry seems to be hating and yet there are some sic ass mother-fuckers that keep us motivated. So what’s the problem?
We are told that we should Double or Triple our prices. Skaters want to pay more because, “you get what you pay for”, and Brands want us to charge more because they know how good these boards are and what the profit margins are. I really can’t believe it. All of longboarding is asking us to raise our prices? We must be deaf….. So do I understand this right? It’s not about skateboarding, it’s about Money???
Can we charge more? I don’t know. I owned the very first longboard only shop in the world, (stolen boards, and if you don’t believe it, ask Michael Brooke the owner of Concrete Wave Magazine, here is his email mbrooke@interlog.com) and all I remember was everyone asking for a deal. In fact, it’s been that way for all six skate shops that I’ve had, all of which sold the crap out of “churchill” product beacuse we make bad-ass skateboards. Now we have an online shop to hook skaters up. So start skating, then skate some more, break your shit, and come back here, Churchill will have a deal waiting for you. For us, it’s about skateboarding and maybe a few other riders have figured that out too.
PS: Another question that we fail to answer is; Why are we not on the ‘Fish?”. We have threads, templates and uncuts on there plus, a huge banner pops up randomly at the top of the forum. Yep, we contribute by buying ad space to thank them for making a killer online community for longboarding. But the ‘Fish is dominated by one of the sickest dudes in Longboarding, Russ from Clutch. Look up his thread, if you don’t already know ‘em. He kills it on there and everyone loves him and his wood (hahaha), including us. We would post more on the fish, but for some reason that forum is super slow on all of my computers and I can’t stand it. Maybe it’s our flash banner ad slowing it down.
Goin’ on Today at 11:00
969 La Felice Ln. Fallbrook,
http://www.facebook.com/events/326610517399463/
Your Board Will Break
Three years ago we came up with Del Mar Drop Through Hardware. The idea was to use Truss Head Bolts with Large Washers to properly support the board and help keep down breakage. Drop Throughs are weaker than standard top mount designs. The cut out in the board and the extra pressure put on the hardware, spread over a smaller surface area, makes for a more fragile design. The plus to drop throughs is the ability to get the deck low to the ground. The truth is, all drop throughs need washers under the nylock nuts. To help out, we broughtour Drop Through Hardware back to the web-store. Use 1″ drop through hardware on 7-8ply decks and 1.25″ on 9ply boards.
Are you riding a drop through with no washers? Then order up some hardware or get your ass over to Home Depot and grab some #10 or larger washers and get them under your NUTS. The larger the better. Even standard 1/4″ washers will work. Skate more, break boards less!
Ya Yibin
Sic!
Skateboards Break
So we are getting all kinds of emails and complaints lately. It seems we have had two Jasmine decks break and sent out a couple of boards with extra holes that were drilled a little off. The response by the haters is, “you get what you pay for!”. So out of 29,000 Jasmine decks sold, two broke. To that we say, all boards can break. Most boards are wood and wood is organic. Skateboards have been breaking for 30 years and a whole industry has been built around it. The Jasmine is a drop through and ALL DROP THROUGH’s require WASHERS under the nuts. You cannot put the nuts direclty onto the wood and expect the board not to crack. If the wood cracks, the board breaks! We sell decks and leave it up the rider to build them and drop through completes come with washers installed. We are little to blame because we forgot how many new riders there are coming into skateboarding and we didn’t tell them to use washers so, it’s our fault. However the internet is out there to help riders. Anyway, we will be bringing our 1″ DROP THROUGH hardware back onto the site this week and it will be required to ensure the strength of your drop through.
So now to the ,”you get what you pay for”, part of the post. I wish we could say it costs us less to make a board than other brands but it doesn’t. In fact it probably costs more because our wood is purchased from Wisconsin and grown in Canada and the USA. It’s by the top veneer mill that has been selling to the professional skateboard market since day one. It costs more than Chinese maple and is more consistant than that of some of the smaller mills. We do not mix our boards with cheaper core materials like poplar or birch. IE: Churchill decks are 100% Hard Maple all the way through. So then how can the haters justify spending two or three times more for a deck? That’s the power of a graphic. Put a $1 heat transfer (graphic) on the bottom of a skateboard deck and sell it complete for $300-$400. Yep, that’s all it is. Put a picture on the bottom and bam, you got bank.
They say we don’t support skateboarding because we don’t have a team or run ads. Yes we do. Every single month we run a full page ad in Concrete Wave, published by our good friend and Owner, Michael Brooke. We also advertise on Silverfish, a full size banner. As for team, we have “B” team riders all over the world and have even sponsored the one and only Blind, yep we said BLIND, skateboarder Cameron Black. Anyway, I felt like ranting today because we make killer fucking boards and suck at graphics so we don’t charge the extra $100 per deck because there is a crappy graphic on the bottom and all morning we are getting emails because some dude broke his Jasmine and another dude got an Apple with crooked holes. I say hate us, we are not perfect.
So we are taking the day off and going skating to tear some shit apart. Skate more, bitch less! We are a skateboard company, not Microsoft! Our complaints department is closed.
Oh, and we do have say thanks to those of you have sent out, “thank you”, emails:. We appreciate ’em.
INSANE
Check this out. Nice work Scarborough817! Diggin’ it. Comment…
Happy Mother’s Day
We should be celebrating our Mom’s today, and many of us are! But this is a good time to do some testing on the website and try to get a better shopping cart working so we can list all the killer products that we offer in a better way. I figure it takes or Mom’s hours to get ready, so we have a little time to kill. Please stand by while we ad and delete pages and shopping carts over the few hours and don’t forget to take Mom out for a nice Champagne brunch or at least buy her a card.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
There’s no stopping now! Look at what the cat brought in. Meet Angel and Star. Meow!
Waiting For Something
Have you been waiting on your APPLE board? All Apple orders are now shipped!
Haha, Loved or Hated
HATED! I think there are two dudes and one chick out there that may still like us. Man did we piss some riders off on reddit by ending the YouTube Promo. I guess we are the Walmart of skateboarding, we are ruining the industry, we’re liars and rip everyone off. Oh, and we make cheap crap too. All that in a single thread. That has to be a world record. Where’s Guinness Book at? We finally found a way in! Actually, I think I’ll just take a Guinness instead. Hahaha. This is my favorite thread so far.
BTW: As I said, everyone who bought a board before May 5th, is good to go on the Promo. Which is everyone so far, since we had to take the paypal buy it now buttons off the site. Seems pretty simple to us. “Why y’all so jacked up?”.
http://www.reddit.com/r/longboarding/comments/tboqv/wtf_churchill/
YouTube Promo Update
First off, we have to send out a huge thanks to everyone who took us up on our YouTube promo, Paint your Shit, program. I posted up a video page where you can see some of the homies and homegirls who took us up on the offer.
So as of May 5th, the PROMO is over for now. It seems whenever you offer free shit, skaters figure out a way to take advantage of it. We feel our deals are pretty kick-ass already so the promos are just a way of saying thanks to riders that want to put in a little extra. So, due to all the switching of decks, combining shipping, sending free decks to friends and so on, we honestly just don’t have the time to meet all the crazy demands that are outside of the rules, and we are fucking it up and making more work for ourselves and losing a shit ton more money than we planned on. If everyone followed the rules, we would be golden. But, this is skateboarding and why the fuck would anyone stick to the rules. We don’t so we can’t expect you too, either. Let’s all skate more and prosper. So for now, just send us your money orders and grab some sic ass new boards, we can use the cash flow.
Good News
We gave paypal the finger and set up a new merchant account. Our online store will be back up and running this week without all the headaches and hassles of paypal. We apologize for the hassle that Paypal, and our dumb-ass decision to use them has caused you. So online payments are coming and in the mean time, send us a money order and take off 10% from your entire order for mailing your order in. See the info page for ordering through the mail.
Thought For The Day
“6 in mornin police at my door”. Not really, but I did find these sites about paypal and couldn’t agree more! I just realized we paid them 5 grand in commisions last month and for that, they locked our account. They want a $15,000 deposit in order for us to keep our account active. Wow! Kimberly, their risk management employee that made the wise decision, basically said that if we can’t afford that then we can’t make it in business. I wonder how we have made it so long! Paypal has some real quality people working for ‘em. Hope I never meet them on the street.
http://www.paypalsucks.com/
http://screw-paypal.com/
All Crystal Backorders Have Shipped
If you haven’t received your Crystal Deck yet, it shipped yesterday with the rest of these boxes and is on the road to your front door. Thanks for waiting.
Waiting For This
Peek-A-Boo
Look who’s peeking around the corner.
BANNED BY PAYPAL
Paypal has frozen our account due to high sales volume. WTF! They are holding all of our money and yours. They say we are too much of a risk and that they have no way of knowing if we ship orders. So they want to hold $15,000 for six months as a retainer in case our customers use stolen cards and then review the account after that.
Rest assured we are shipping all current orders as fast as possible so don’t sweat it, online payment will be back up with a bigger and badder credit card processor in a couple of days. Let us know if you have any recommendations.
What a phone call I had with Kimberly in risk management at paypal. Talk about the worst customer care I have ever had. So they just freeze accounts? They make a fortune off of us. Of course they will still take your money but they won’t let us have it until we they feel they have enough saved up to cover “their” liability. What does that even mean? All she said in 20 minutes what a risk Churchill and it’s customers are to paypal. Most likely it’s just that we are in skateboarding and I am sure that’s a huge red flag. So much for being a customer of theirs for 12 years.
Instead of you guys continually paying through paypal and having them hold that money, we are requesting Checks or Money orders until we get a new online payment provider.
(working on one right now)
I would really like to rant and rave but you get the idea. Man, it is hard to sell skateboards these days. Anyway, put your order together, mail it to us with a check or money order and we will ship it right then and there.
Oh ya, and anyone who mails payment in can take off 10% from their entire order total.
That should sweeten the pot.
Sorry for the hassle. We are pretty shocked. All paypal orders are shipping even though they are holding your money and we cannot access it.
ORDERS:
Troy Churchill Manufacturing
POB 460144
Escondido, CA 92046
Blow Dan up with questions, concerns and especially orders. We can use them.
(619) 971-3734
dan@churchillmfg.com
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”
Have you seen these yet?
Penny Killer Completes are Back In
We had to curve some email requests for more “PK” completes so we snapped up some more solid 70mm wheels and built some up. This time we are using 1/2″ Rubber Wedge Risers and dressing them out with a Bamboo Deck. Check ‘em out in the Skate Shop
