When we cut our controller bodies we start off with a long piece of wood and use our CNC machine to mill it into 4 bodies. We use almost the whole board, but we always have a little left over.

After a few years of  seeing these end scraps piling up, we decided to get some use out of them. Travis used our Metal Bot (metal milling machine) to make a large logo to brand the milled wood and turn them into dealer plaques. The plaques were finished a water based VOC free lacquer and sent off to our dealers. This is the extent to our marketing budget, we prefer to put those dollars into developing new products.  You can see these plaque at your local dealer (dealer locator can be found here).

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Thanks to the dot com era, the term branding has almost surpassed “b2b marketing” to become the lamest word in business. If you are in marketing, well just take a cue from Bill Hicks. Seriously though the term comes from livestock branding, a means to identify ownership that dates back to ancient times. I have always liked the way a brand looks especially on wood, so in 2003 when we made our first “production model” controller called the Tactic, we made our very own Livid brand. This is the very same brand we use today. Travis cut it out of Brass and steel (brass on the brand because is heats up a lot faster) and we started branding our instruments. Six years later we still brand each and every controller. Travis actually does it himself by heating up the brand with a torch and pressing it to the back of the controller before it goes into the finish process. Here is a video of Travis branding a batch of controllers. I really had to bite my tongue on the cowboy jokes here.

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news by Jay