Driven Sports Re-booted

Welcome to (or welcome back) to our blog.

If you followed these posts in the past you’re probably aware that they weren’t a frequent occurrence. There’s a good chance that many of you don’t know much about us at all – beyond our small line of products, and whatever you might have read about us in the press.

That was by design. We’re a very small company, and our staff has never been close to the size necessary to sustain the advertising/promotions, media, and customer outreach of many of our significantly larger competitors. And beyond the fact that we have so few employees, each one of us gravitates heavily towards science, research, and serial experimentation. There’s a chance that has left us seeming like a faceless business… but that’s about to change.

We’re looking to the future, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to ignore the past. In fact, much of our direction going forward from this point on will be charted out in our blog, and our social media outreach is going to be informed directly by tough lessons we’ve learned from the past.

What Does The Past Tell Us?

The legacy of Craze sits as a series of watershed moments for our company. The very first of those occurred when we realized that we had a game-changing (no, we are not using that term loosely!) formula for a pre-workout. Due to the exhaustive nature of our developing and testing of the product, this was not an instant realization. The inverse of this good news was when we realized that the unrelenting controversy surrounding this product would likely be the end of it. And that controversy is something we would have handled very differently if somehow we were given the opportunity again. But while we can’t relive the past, we can apply our hard-earned wisdom to smaller battles we might encounter in the future.

Living through an extremely high profile media crisis is thankfully not an experience most individuals or small businesses will ever have. And while so few of us have first-hand knowledge of what that’s like, many of us are very quick to cast immediate judgment and make broad, simple conclusions based on personal intuition of a legal mess that might be extraordinarily complex. In our case, the most damning observation was that we remained mostly silent against the barrage of accusations of product spiking that were leveled at us by legions of concerned consumers, longstanding competitors in the supplement world, journalists out to make a name for themselves, litigation-hungry lawyers, and elected legislators jostling to show themselves as the guardians of their constituents.

Our policy of firm but quiet denial was one that was dictated to us by our retained legal counsel, and while lawyers are very good at identifying “safe” and “pragmatic” solutions to brewing problems, these strategies often have the unfortunate side effect of leaving those who adhere to them feeling demoralized and deeply regretful for waiving their opportunity to stand firmly in defense of their actions and integrity. That silence was a defensive posture that did indeed help us to weather this storm while avoiding further complications – at least from a purely legal perspective. But staying quiet has taken its toll, and we will stay silent no longer. One of our intentions with this reboot of our blog is to clear the air regarding Craze, using it as a forum both to state unequivocally and to provide conclusive documentary evidence that Craze was always a lawful, unadulterated, and purely naturally derived product that met its label claims fully. 

Always Recognizable As Ourselves & Never Confused With Anybody Else

This blog, however, is not just about doubling down on our claims of being a fundamentally honest sports supplement company that has always acted in accordance not only with the letter of dietary supplement regulations, but also in the spirit of those laws – taking the high ground an untold countless number of times while others did not hesitate to break these rules. It’s about looking to new things. We’re not interested in folding what began as our cottage industry and quietly reforming under new names or identities.  We are proud of what we have built and we want to continue that legacy. We aren’t interested in changing anything under the hood: that secret sauce of hard work, methodical self-experimentation, and scientific rigor that has worked for us so well, and is sometimes rewarded with a blockbuster product. We aren’t interested in reformulating our existing products, or changing up our logo or bottle designs – because all that stuff works great as it is. What we are changing is how we engage with our customers, our critics, and the curious. The days of staying aloof and diplomatically distant are behind us.

The easiest way to see exactly what we have in mind is to stay tuned to this blog and follow us as we broaden our original content available through social media. We want to to spark discussions and an exchange of ideas both with regular supplement users who take or might be interested in trying our supplements; we also want to encourage a higher-level of discourse among industry insiders and experienced supplementation enthusiasts whose interests and explorations overlap with our own. Every sports supplement company provides write-ups of their product formulations (sometimes in excruciating details) and we are no stranger to that convention. Even so, there are often much deeper, richer stories surrounding those products that usually remain untold to outsiders. These stories are informative and oftentimes entertaining. But they tell a lot about our work culture and values. We might be a bit too small to print up tens of thousands of t-shirts for our fans, but we hope that we can ultimately provide you with something that nobody in this industry has yet offered to the public: an appreciation for the work of sports supplement formulation when it’s performed exhaustively and with diligence.  A remarkable proportion of the money we make through sales ends up reinvested in the R&D cycle to spur the creation of future products, rather than in some kind of flashy public spectacle. It’s our very simple version of a product life cycle that deliver strong results for our customers and helps us push forward constantly.

We’re Not Changing Our Benchmark For Success

You don’t have to take our word on any of this. Our product history speaks plainly for itself. You may or may not remember ever seeing one of our ads in a bodybuilding magazine. But if you did, you know there weren’t any crazy claims in huge letters. You can easily see that our products have also looked the same for years and years. We get it – plenty of people like change, even if they’re just cosmetic ones. But we’d much rather bring you something new than repaint the house. Between the high standards we uphold for ourselves, and the burden of bringing new products to market as a small outfit, this doesn’t happen very quickly or easily. But in addition to the new informational outreach that we’ve promised above, there are definitely new DS products on the horizon to balance out all this talk with some walk. It’s not our intention to play the teasing game, so we’ll leave it at that.

Welcome to our special part of this industry. We’re very much looking forward to telling you more about how we do things in this part of town.