Rollance - Pausing the Production Indefinitely

TLDR: I plan to make 0 frames for this upcoming season. The main reason is related to the manufacturing difficulty of the frames which I’m responsible for.

It’s always been a challenge to manufacture the frames. I find new issues every time I think I figured it out this time. It appeared to me during the past couple years that using and manipulating liquid polyurethane which contains liquid isocyanate has health and safety hazards. Last year I was confident I could figure out this major issue before the season started. It’s an issue so important for me that I would rather not produce frames than take the risk on my health. It also applies for delegating the task of manufacturing the frames by another human. I would be negligent to deletage the risk to somebody else.

There’s also another major issue that started getting my attention; quality control. The frames are of polyurethane. This comes in large containers that needs to be stored at a temperature. The quality of the polyurethane can degrade on the shelves, it also has a lifetime. When I receive the product by mail, I have no guarantee whatsoever that the containers were kept at the right temperature. I also don’t have a method yet to validate that the mix of the resins was done according to the specification required. In clear, I still have to establish a quality control protocol to validate that each frame is properly molded. Which is critical for a product where the consumers will use the product and expect it to not fail during an activity that put them at risk. I now have a new mindset regarding the quality control for a product where the failure of the product could lead to an injury or death of its user. So I need to flip the manufacturing process of the company again. The company needs to change from a manufacturing company that cares about quality to a quality control company that resell or manufactured products. Which is a major change that takes more than a few weeks.

For those reasons, but also others I will pause indefinitely the sale of the Hockey & Freestyle frames until I figure out how to solve those two major issues. It’s possible that it’s going to be delayed indefinitely since those two issues are hard problems to solve.