A multitude of people walking in the same direction make for a clear path. Thankfully, we’re given plenty of glimpses at the sort of life that path leads to. Otherwise we may be tempted to follow along. Despite the ease and comforts, maybe because of them, the status quo isn’t a common target in the world of DiamondBack.
That’s true of our company and products, how we spend our time, how we raise our children, and how we look after one another. We know we can do better if we’re willing to work for it. The DiamondBack team, along with the growing community who use our products, welcomes the challenge.
We run full-speed into those challenges for two reasons. Because life is more fun that way, and because it’s the best way to accurately determine what we’re capable of doing with our time on Earth. We’ve learned through our own hurdling of obstacles that with an honest effort we’re capable of quite a bit. More often we’ve learned it by watching the monumental undertakings and wild successes of you, our customers.
When DiamondBack sold our very first cover, it was to a like-minded admirer of the prototype Matt Chverchko built for himself. Matt’s an avid hunter who had the will to do better by himself and his truck. Some of his costly hunting gear went walking and he was hell bent on stopping another theft. But he didn’t want the trade-offs of traditional tonneau covers that everyone else quietly accepted.
He wanted peace of mind that his gear would stay dry and secure, and he wanted a cover built tougher than the truck it was going on. Far from the status quo.
What followed was the discovery that a whole slew of people wanted the same thing in a truck bed cover. Not just hunters and anglers, but hikers and climbers, overlanders, mountaineers, wing suit pilots, falconists, labor day campers, travel team parents, and people who just do the next thing before they bother naming it. It’s been a pleasure to meet you all.
Hearing your stories, learning how you use our products, has motivated our continued belief that we can and must do better. Some of your pursuits are things we didn’t know existed back in 2003. What we share is the will to try for the sake of trying, and a deafness to that very reasonable part of our brain that says “this is probably a bad idea.”
140,000 trailblazers, at last count, cover their trucks and belongings with a DiamondBack. All of them unwilling to accept the status quo from themselves, let alone their gear.
Our list of bad ideas is too long to include here, but they were generated and considered in pursuit of our best. And many of those bad ideas are now seen as the very things that separate us from the pack.
Our Lifetime Warranty and 30-day Test Drives were bad ideas at one time. Now they’re fixtures in our business. Medeco multi-angled, laser-cut key cylinders are fixtures, too. Excessive? Absolutely. And the only ones we’d trust.
Matt’s idea to haul ATVs faced endless opposition. A bad idea unless you’re one the thousands who ditched their trailer 20 years ago and have smiled at the rearview ever since. Our 35 For 40 workweek was a pretty bad idea to some, especially when we had a backlog of orders. Tell it to the growing team who see their families sooner, hit the trails earlier, and are building more DiamondBacks than ever before.
The list goes on and on, and it’s still growing. Some of them come from you, our customers. We love that you’re no more willing than we are to accept what “has to be.”
We’re all built different, not because of genius or luck or because we have the right contact. We’re built different because we have the will to be.
