Only 3 flashlights on his site, no more Noctigon, anything.
On the homepage:
Intl-Outdoors got a US warehouse: https://intl-outdoor.com/us-warehouse-product.html
That makes importers such as Mountain Electronics redundant. It is very hard to compete with direct sales from the manufacturer.
Actually, could be a really great thing going forward. Especially if Mtn continues to produce products that align with the goals of the community. I would not mind at all seeing more advanced driver development and availability. Currently, if you can’t reflow drivers yourself, the options are a bit limited. For example: Know anywhere you can buy something like a FET+1 or single-sided FET driver in sizes like 10mm or 14mm?
I agree Scallywag, i see this as promising and am interested to see what their own products will be.
I just hope the business stays profitable. I’m burned out on cheap and flaky stuff from China, I’d rather buy from Mountain anything they carry.
It was nice to be able to get convoy hosts locally, but I can understand there are a lot of different models and it may not make sense to stock lots of them.
They said they aren’t carrying complete lights, they didn’t say anything about hosts. Carrying drivers and stuff but no hosts to put them in would be pretty dumb.
Good point. However, it all depends on what is selling/profitable. If the main business comes from selling drivers to modders that already have the host I could see it making sense to reduce the hosts you carry, or at least reduce to the best sellers.
I noticed that too, but that’s fine. I’d rather have drivers I want in stock, and new drivers along with emitters in bins I actually want, and more modding parts. I guess If you want high performance prebuilt lights Simon sells prebuilt on AE for cheap, so does Sofirn, Astrolux, Lumintop etc for reasonable prices. I’d be sad if a domestic seller stops selling hosts though!
That was always an option but some people like having a US source so they don’t have to wait for the slow boat from China.
True that. I don’t like waiting (especially now). Sofirn and International Outdoors have US-based products. Until enough makers decide to drop ship from here, then it’s the slow boat for now. Normal shipping with Simon is like 14 days which isn’t terrible, but not the 4 days if you buy from Mountain or Amazon.