Last autumn Vincent got a message in the chat box from a dealer near Fort Worth, Texas. He sold torches at gun shows and wanted something a little different from the same flat-bezel models everyone there was carrying.
What he wanted was a crenellated bezel — the toothed ring at the front — but not too aggressive, because his customers complained the sharp ones chewed up their pockets. And a small shroud over the tail switch so it would not turn on by accident in a bag. Reasonable asks, nothing crazy.
First call, we mostly just listened and got the sizes wrong in our heads. He was talking in inches and rough hand gestures over video, and our bezel dies are all in mm. So Vincent asked him to take a photo with a ruler next to the kind of bezel he liked from another brand. That one photo saved us a week.
Second call we showed him a 3D print of the bezel, cheap PLA, just to check the tooth shape and the shroud height. He said the teeth were good but the shroud sat too proud, it blocked his thumb on a quick press. We shaved two milimetres off and that fixed it.
I should mention the time zone thing, because it nearly killed the project. Texas is fourteen hours behind us. His evening is our morning. So every "call" was really him staying up late or us coming in early, and Vincent ended up doing two of the three from his kitchen at 6am with a coffee. Buyers never think about this part.
The custom bezel and shroud added a small tooling cost, which we split with him because we figured we would reuse the bezel shape on stock models anyway, and we have. Minimum order was 300 units for the first run, which for a gun-show dealer is a real commitment, so we sent two finished samples first at our cost.
He has reordered twice since. The lesson I keep relearning is that the photo with the ruler beats any amount of talking. If you want something custom from us, send pictures and a ruler before you write a paragraph.
