As time goes by and the gi market changes, I keep going back to one question: Why do people buy gis from us? It’s a simple question, but it keeps us grounded, and it makes us focus on what is important.

We want to know, are we delivering good quality gear? Are we providing top notch customer service? Are we shipping on time? And finally, are we helping the greater BJJ community?

This has been our focus over the last 7 years. Yet, somehow, we lost sight of this over the last year. Let me explain why and what we are doing to get back on track.

On April 26th of 2018, our first son Leo came into the world, six weeks early (right in the middle of watching Avengers Infinity War, literally). Thankfully, we had been working on front-loading as much of our workload as possible (gi and rashguard designs, factory orders, etc.) in order to be able to spend as much time as possible with him.

For the first time, we brought in help for our customer service email. It was hard letting go of the cs@invertedgear.com inbox, but it felt necessary. We were venturing into the unknown -- Leo is our first child. We needed time away from what at this point had been our metaphorical baby to in order to be parents for our new human baby.

When Leo arrived, we took some time off. I still checked in with the warehouses and factories to make sure everything ran smoothly. And for the most part it did.

But cases started to accumulate. Wrong items were sent, orders were late, we were plagued with inventory issues, and for the first time ever people who reached out for help dealt with someone not named Nelson or Hillary. Some of the trust we built over the years started to slip. For that, we are truly sorry. I know some of you had to reach out to me directly on social media to get things sorted out, and it should not have come to that.

So what are we doing to regain your trust?

We have moved our operation to Allentown, PA, so the warehouse is now 15 minutes down the road where we can keep a better eye on it. We hope to have much better shipping times. Any order before 3 PM should be shipped same day. Anything after will go out first thing the next day.

We are instituting much tighter inventory control. We have retaken control of the customer service inbox. We are doing our best to keep an appropriate response time, even if it means doing the bulk of email at 5 AM while Leo sleeps. We are checking our inbox multiple times a day. If you email us over the weekend or late on Friday, we will get back to you first thing on Monday.

Finally, we are working on a new project to give back to the greater BJJ community. Kids gis are back for the first time since our original shipment. Every time you buy a kids gi, we will donate one to a charity. We already sent our first care package to our friends over a Higher Ground in Tucson, Arizona. You can read more about them here.

We are hoping to donate another 100 gis by end of the year. We have a few programs picked out. If you know of a Jiu-Jitsu program working with kids that could use some uniforms, send us an email!

As always, thank you for your continued support. We hope to continue to provide the best quality and service you have to come to expect from us. We are headed the right way.