Around the time in February when Ben and Jeff visited Shanghai, X came up with what we thought was a winning slogan. “We came to play, and we brought better toys.” X had raised the level of hydro jetboarding up by improving the equipment and quality, putting the industry leader on the defensive. We thought that the term toys was cool because the super yachts industry uses the term “toys” to describe everything that gets stacked into the floating multi-million dollar playgrounds. All good right? Cool high tech toys, just like Seabobs. Then someone announced a plastic product to the market, with all the characteristics of a literal toy. Suddenly it felt kind of painful to degrade our equipment with a name like “toy”, even for fun. Our gear wasn’t a “better toy”, it was sport gear.
We decided to put some distance in between X and the others. X takes this sport and its future seriously. What we make is sport equipment, real gear for a real sport. The light came on, the contrast is clear, we will not refer to our equipment again as toys. The “We came to play” slogan is officially retired.