These are all the questions that I hear are regularly asked in social groups and forums, firstly, I apologise that I am not more active on social media to answer these questions personally. There was a time, a few years ago, when I was able to be in every group and forum and answer all the questions personally. Somewhere along the line we went from being my little lifestyle business to something a bit bigger, and it all became a lot more impersonal, and I find myself with a lot less time available to do this.
Don’t get me wrong, we are still only a small family business, and we do our best to provide the level of service that we would like to receive ourselves, but it can be challenging, especially this year!!
I understand that there are lots of questions about Tronixpro and what we are doing regarding rods, so I hope that this will give you a bit of information as to where we are and our plans for the future.
2020 has been an exceptional year in every way, and none of us could have seen it coming. For many reasons, we have had long periods out of stock and have had to discontinue some ranges. I hope to clear up as much of that as I can here.
I’m going to give you a bit of insight into each of our ranges from the most expensive down to the least expensive, here it goes:
You may have seen that we have just released the Competition Match series, for now, this will be our highest price point, we will be adding some more models to this range, these will come out late 2021 or early 2022. I hope that you like these rods we have put a good two years of research and development into them.
The Cobra range, despite many rumours, will stay as it is. All the feedback we get from our shops and customers is that they love them and we won’t be discontinuing them! Although the original three-piece GT is over seven years old, we still sell a good quantity and the two-piece we launched a couple of years ago is very popular too. It is still our flagship model and our first very successful rod.
The Blaze series will stay as it is, after a slow start, sales have begun to pick up. I appreciate the colours are not everybody’s cup of tea, but we like them, and they are very decent rods, what’s wrong with a bit of colour eh?!
The next price point is the Xenon range. I discontinued the three-piece TT Power this year as I wanted to go in a different direction with it. There will be a range of three-piece rods added to the current two-piece models and the travel rod (Match, Power, Travel), these will arrive around September 2021 and will offer some good continental options in the £150-£250 price range. We will also expand this range as we move into 2022.
Next, we HAD Aphex, unfortunately about a year ago we received a legal letter from another manufacturer saying that the use of the name Aphex was an infringement of one of their copyrights, we disagreed, but as a small family business we did not want to end up in court with one of the biggest tackle companies in the industry, so we decided that we would bow down and remove these from the market.
Unfortunately, this left a significant gap in our range this year. We have a replacement range that will come out in Spring 2021.
I don’t want to say too much about it as I don’t like to advertise things until they are available, but let’s say that there is a new range of twenty rods coming out all priced between £100 and £150 retail.
Last but by no means least we have the Guerilla series. These have proved incredibly popular, and we got caught short on stock this year, we have plenty on order, and they will start to arrive back in stock in January. The Guerilla series are all priced under £100 retail, and we have also added another eight models which will arrive in June 2021.
I hope that this at least shows you a little bit of what we have planned for the future, as you know, the world is a little bit crazy at the moment. We are faced with daily struggles regarding production times (some factories are already at full capacity until 2022) and shipping (prices have increased by about 800% in the last three months, and that’s if you are lucky enough to find container space).
We have been and continue to work incredibly hard on product development; we just got caught out a little bit this year by the pandemic and the uncertainty of what the future holds.
There will be a new catalogue released in April, and our new products will be added to the website, so you will be able to see the full new ranges. I appreciate all of your support, and it means a lot. We have come a long way from selling feathers out of my garage, and I don’t plan on slowing down at all, far from it, we have ambitious but realistic plans for the future, and we certainly couldn’t do it without your support.
I wish you all a very merry and fish-filled Christmas and a happy New Year!
George
