Today's blog is inspired by your feedback.

That feedback comes from Fans, Friends, Family, Customers, Wholesale accounts, Events...all of you. 

No matter what we change, we always have new goals because your feedback keeps coming. That's the job. We have to want to be better and find ways to make things work.

We started planning this 2025 version of Mint in the late summer of 2024. Mint was self aware of it's own problems. I've already covered my own personal struggles as well in FM Blog #1 if you haven't read that.

The Need to Adapt:

Guy and myself knew we had to make some big changes with Mint if we wanted to adapt to the current pace of the disc golf industry. 

The "foundation" we had built with Mint was pretty big:

1. The best fan community
2. An amazing team of players
3. Austin Texas - The Disc Golf Capital of The World.
4. Heart of Texas Tour & Wildflower Tour(not owned by us though).
5. Sprinkle Valley DGC

If our goal was to build a community first, we did that. 

The one thing DD always did right was supporting Emporia. We are admittedly heavily inspired by the early days of DD. They focused on events and courses and taking care of their people. Disc Golf responded really well to that. They still have die hard fans to this day because of that. That's awesome.

I'll be interested to see if MVP, Discraft and Innova start devoting resources to building championship venues like we did with Austin Beerworks at Sprinkle Valley. Disc Golf needs more venues like Sprinkle.

The concept of Sprinkle started 3ish years ago when ABW asked for our help. Sprinkle still has a LONG way to go in it's development too. Austin Beerworks will do some amazing things with that property over time. I feel so lucky Mint is a part of it.

Let me stress this: Sprinkle Valley is not just a seasonal venue like USDGC. This is every day, all the time, in a large metropolitan area. This does not exist anywhere else in the United States.

Innova, Discraft and MVP might be too big to take on projects like this. They have a lot more bills to pay than Mint does. More risk. I doubt they can afford to operate it on green's fees and discs alone. 

We certainly couldn't afford to operate this property if ABW didn't own it. You need the total package of a brewery/bar, food trucks, and disc store to make it work.

You also need to do all of this in a major city. There aren't a lot of places like Austin that people can travel to for disc golf 365 days a year. Sprinkle Valley will stay unique for a while because of that one key factor: our location.

Side note: I love what Paul McBeth is doing with courses. He's building a network of them you can travel to.

The problems and some introspection:

If we are being honest, we have done an awful job at merchandising Mint.

Aside from great discs and cool hats, we sucked at the other stuff. We also struggled with how best to plan each disc release. It didn't help that until about 3 years ago, we all had full time jobs and Mint was run out of Guys garage.

We literally RAN into the covid boom. Got a new warehouse. Quit our jobs. RAN into Sprinkle Valley and US Women's. It worked but it was hard. We risked it.

But we wanted the biscuit.

We put a lot of our business development on hold to focus on US Women's and Sprinkle. The last two years were spent getting those things ready, not making Mint better. It helped to have a factory that always delivered for us.

I think we have always done well with our disc art. We work with a variety of great people to contract the art designs for Mint. We do not have an in-house art or marketing director. It's still just Guy and myself taking these ideas and pushing them.

Mint has art for everyone. It isn't one set style. The artists do a great job of "staying Mint" with the design requests. I don't know how they do it. I guess we are really a representation of them, more than they of us. A lot of them also send us ideas. They know what you want to see. Like impressively so. ZAM did this with the Turtle Salamander.

I enjoy not having one set style in that regard. I think you all do to or else we wouldn't be in business today.

Going into 2025 though, we wanted to change how we approached merchandising.  Customers were buying differently. You all have different demands now. We need to listen to those.

We did not want to make any changes that felt like money grabs. We have always been able to make more discs, but doing so would completely ruin the impact of the serial # system. It's also a huge financial commitment since we we contract through MVP. We cant turn on a machine and make 500 discs like Gateway can. It takes months to get those discs.

So Mint is not interested in being as big as Innova, Discraft and MVP right now. We can't compete with them.

Mint is interested in improving how we work with you, the customer. We are focused on getting better at what we already do.

How the factory plays into this:

Truthfully, our relationship with MVP has always been one that is "at our own pace". Yes, sometimes they had delays, sometimes we did too. That's business.  Shit happens. They are doing their best.

But how many discs we made and when we wanted them...that was always on Mint to tell MVP. They have always delivered on what we ordered.

The way we chose to build Mint originally had a direct relation to the non-disclosure agreement we had in place with MVP before we sold our first disc.

For those unaware, up until a few years ago we did not tell anyone who made our discs. Sure, the fans figured it out. Mint and MVP knew they would. The stickers were literally the same!

The NDA stayed in place for a few reasons: Originally MVP had never made discs for anyone else. They were building a new factory too.

We also wanted to establish ourselves without the influence of their brand. 

We wanted to be Mint, not MVP. 

It made a lot of sense for both us to not have that influence over the other one. We are our own company.

Eventually Mint and MVP got to a point where it made sense to be more open about it.

Managing that separation is hard when you can't talk about it directly with fans. We could not give you real answers. It felt like a lie at times since you knew our truth. "Haters" could come up to me at every event and try to say MVP as loud as they could in front of everyone shopping at our tent. I just had to smile and say hello.

We still can't talk about everything. That's ok. That's business.

I am glad we can now be proud of who makes our discs. I am glad MVP continues to adapt to our needs. At the end of the day we are their customer, not their partner. 

Below is a list. This list represents 99% of the feedback we get from you:

1. When will you run this disc again?
2. When will you make this plastic again?
3. How do I find more of this disc?
4. When will you update the Serial # database?
5. How do I find more of this stamp?
6. Do you have a flight chart? (this is a BIG one)
7. Why don't you put flight numbers on your discs?
8. Can you make more shirts? How about bags? Or mini discs?

These are all of the things you expect a disc golf company to have answers for. The things our competitors dominate at. We were ignoring some of them. We didn't have time to do them. Now we do. We built up all the harder stuff first. The people, the venue, the events.

How we are responding to your feedback:

If I am being honest here, the serial # system does have some limitations to it. It can be overwhelming for new customers to dive into. People also tend to lose interest in models after the first few runs(since you have enough!).

It also means we need to make discs in set batches so that the Serial # is easier to manage. It means we need to be able to talk about why each run is special and unique.

This works well with MVP. They really care about the products they make. Every single item that comes out of their factory goes through a level of Q/A checks that no other disc golf factory can do right now. 

So for 2025 we knew where to start.

We decided to double down on our serial # system. We decided to focus on fixing the problems you might have with us. We decided it made sense to make more runs, more frequently, but at lower volumes. It's working so far.

We will now always plan to announce our releases weeks to months ahead of time. If we don't, please call me out. 

We want you to always know that it will be "Alpha month" or "Lobster Week" each year. Some of you can't always afford every release. You need to be able to plan just like us.

Magic the Gathering is a good example of how I think Mint can operate. They do a great job of telling all of their customers when new items are coming out each year. Shoutout to all of you that play!

Mint can meet that request by improving how we communicate with everyone who supports us. 

I can tell you today that Freetails, Grackles, Profits and Alphas will follow the Bullet. 

We will probably have other new items mixed in there too. We have already started communicating and hinting about all of this on social media and our website. 

This blog is one of the ways I am doing that. 

Guy has started his own Instagram called Mint_Discs_Stamping where you can see what he is up to each day. We hope to start live streaming his stamping most days too.

The next level of Mint is being built right now. I am really excited. We will grow in ways we always wanted to because we invested in the community first.

These are big operational changes for us to make. It won't be perfect, but we'll keep listening to what you like.

So why I am making this blog today?

Well, I'm 20 days into the Forward Momentum blog. I hope it goes more than a year. I don't want to break the streak. 

I have also seen a lot of fans(new and old) who are not understanding this shift in focus.

We need to communicate it better.

So that's why I woke up and decided to make today's blog.

For example, as a company it sucks to have to explain to disappointed fans why we only made 100 Ninja Turtle Boxes. We probably could have sold 500.

Yes, we need the occasional "rare" item like this to help the brand. That's not always going to be fair to every customer. We tried to mitigate it by limiting it to 1 box each and promising not to re-run the stamp until 2026. 

That box is a reminder that our job is never done. You will always have feedback.

If anything we will start reaching new audiences as we raise the bar. 

New fans have to be able to understand Mint the first moment they see us.

We aren't just a "cool art" company. We aren't just a community based company anymore. We aren't owned or managed by MVP. We aren't just defined by a serial #. We aren't just Texas and Sprinkle Valley anymore. We aren't just Guy and Zach.

But we do encompass a lot of that. All of these things define us to the customer whether they are true or not.

You have your own perception of what Mint is.  It’s probably a little different now.

We will keep growing in new ways.

We have to paint the total picture better as we grow.

We are Mint Discs. You are Mint Discs.

We only last as long as you want us to.

Until tomorrow.