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NEWSFLASH!
FURY MAKES THE BIG TIME - Fury
Cues named the Official Cue of the 2008
GenerationPool.com 9-Ball Championships
And now on with the story....
The Beginning: In
2000, a small group of people came together with one goal; To build a
pool cue that has the hit, feel, and balance of the best custom cues,
yet at prices affordable to most people who work for a living.
Many "custom cuemakers" claimed that it couldn't be done. They said
there was no way that we could produce custom quality in a mass
production environment. Well, we thought differently and set out to
prove them wrong.
First, we got the attention of one factory with over 40 years of
cuemaking experience. They have built millions of cues. Not all of them
were what you'd write home about but they had the machines, the people,
and most importantly, the desire to step up to world class. Then we
partnered up with one of the most influential cuemakers and designers
of the last 20 years. Finally, we lined up distributors in the USA,
Europe, and Asia who all agreed to promote and push our cues if we
could deliver the quality we promised.
The Opinions: Next, we recruited some pro players to tell
us what they wanted. We had them tell us everything they could think of
about why a particular cue felt "good" and another didn't. We took all
this feedback and proceeded to put it into the construction of the Fury
Cue. The factory had to retool and rethink it's methods. They did, and
proudly the first Fury cues started coming off the line in late 2002.
But how would they be accepted by the pool playing public? We knew from
our testing that the pros and amateurs had high praise for them. But
those were test environments. How would Fury cues stack up against all
the good competition out there?
The Proof: In March 2003, we debuted the cue to the
pool public at the Super Billiards Expo. The response was good but
tepid. What could we expect going head to head with the greatest
collection of cuemakers in the world? Well, we did make some fans and
picked up some great dealers.
In May/June
of 2003, we showed at the BCA International Tournament and the VNEA
International Tournament in Las Vegas. Over 18,000 of the world's best
amateur players were in attendance. Here the Fury cues had definitely
"arrived". The most common phrase we heard from the good players that
week was, "this hits good, what brand is this again?"
Our purpose was to get really good feedback to launch into big time
sales. So, we did a little promotion where we gave away Fury T-Shirts
in trade for a player's opinion. Now we knew that most folks would be
inclined to be nice when they were getting a free shirt so we rated the
opinions based on the players skill level, their body language while
shooting, combined with what they said. A good B player's opinion about
how the cue hit didn't get as much weight as an AA player's opinion.
Anyway, we gave out around 1500 t-shirts and collected lots of data,
and made lots of sales as well, which made our accountant happy.
What made us happy though is we knew we had a winner. We didn't put any
prices on the cues. We just let folks play with them and asked them
what they thought the cue was worth. About $700 was the average price
quoted. For the $115 DL Series. We had people trying to trade us their
custom cues when they didn't know the price. When we told them the
price a lot of folks just bought one on the spot.
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