Venom Bushings... where have they gone?
If people are wondering why there has been a shortage of Venom bushings lately, there is a good reason... As some of you know Zak Maytum (guy who started Venom) was in a deal with Paris Trucks for marketing and getting the ball rolling. They had a falling out, and lately there has been some shit fights about the bushings. There has been claims that Paris have been making 'fake' Venom bushings, and Zak has posted up on numerous forums about it. If you have read it you know what im talking about, but here is the main story.
This was taken from one of the forums, Joey from Paris Trucks has posted up his rebuttal to Zak's claims of 'Fake Bushings':
Zaks ranting makes me giggle. Here's the real deal with our stock bushings. This is my side of the story and I'll try and make it as clear as possible. There's obviously a lot more details involved but that's personal business between Zak and I. Since Zak feels the need to lie about certain aspects of the transaction I feel it’s now necessary to defend myself. The bushings we are using are in fact the same formula as Venom bushings. Zak doesn’t own the formula, and doesn’t have the the sole rights to the formula at all. The polymer company owns it and they have agreed to sell it to me for use in Paris Trucks. All due respect to Zak, but unless you bring a chemical formula to the polymer company that is 100% brand new it isn’t truly a unique and patentable formula. Mixing 2 part formulas together in the garage doesn’t exactly warrant a patentable product. So save the drama for your momma. The Paris stock formula is exactly the same as Venoms.
This is my side of this issue...
We were looking to find another option for our stock bushings so I was happy to find out about this kid Zak that was developing a new bushing company. Zak and Venom’s contact info came to us through a mutual friend in CO who told me that the Venom bushings were great and felt especially amazing in Paris trucks so I contacted Zak and began a dialog. My idea was to add branded bushings to Paris so that we could have a better USA made bushing and use an already existing small company instead of starting our own brand. I like the idea of helping a small company with a good reputation to help build it up rather then keep starting more companies further saturating the market. He sent me a bunch of his hand poured Venom bushings, we tested them and really liked them a lot. I then promised Zak OEM orders for Paris based on professionally produced bushings in the same formula. I also stipulated to him that I wanted to help him market and sell his bushings exclusively through Resource Distribution. He was into it and agreed, so I sent him over our stock bushings for the polymer company to make the molds. We’ve all seen Zaks hand poured bushings they work well, but are in no way mold ready! About 3 weeks later we received amazing professionally produced bushings and it was on!
Now here’s where it got complicated... In the beginning my concern with dealing with Zak was that he was a young kid and there was no real marketing and/or sales plan or strategy behind Venom. Our deal with Zak (what we agreed on in the beginning) was that I would help Zak with all the Venom marketing and pay for all the production of Paris OEM bushings AND parts to make the bushings packs for individual sale. My other stipulation was that Resource Distribution was to be the sole distributor of all Venom packaged products. Meaning we would pay for the product, stock, and sell all Venom products with the Venom Logo and formula direct from Costa Mesa, Ca to the USA and ALL other countries of the world. So anybody that needed Venom packaged products would have to buy them from us. Sounded fair to me because we were essentially paying for, running and helping to market his company for him. We originally asked for a 5 year deal in order to protect our time and investment. Now, in the beginning he was more then happy to do enter into this verbal agreement. And why wouldn’t he be? All he had to do is be the owner of Venom, ride his skateboard, tour the world, do R and D and collect money. Oh, and he was also allowed to sell OEM direct to who ever he wanted too. Without our consent or permission. He also be the sole owner of Venom. That’s right, 100% owned by Zak Maytum, as it was when we first started. Pretty good deal I thought. Since I did the new cobra logo, packaging, and most of the actual good branding that was out there for a bit (shooting bushings on the carpet isn't all that good in my opinion), Zak wouldn’t own the logo and it’s branding aspects till the first 5 years of the contract was up. After 5 years if Zak wasn’t happy with our arrangement he could take Venom and all its branding aspect and bail. Free of charge. After all, we needed time to develop the brand and get it into the market place. I knew that after 5 years Zak would be stoked and renegotiate another 5 years. When Zak later reneged on our deal he lost the rights to the Cobra logo, so that’s why he is no longer using it, along with any packaging I produced for him. I did offer it to him at a price, but he couldn’t afford it so on the shelf it sits...
Now all this was fine and dandy in the beginning with Zak, before we really started getting into the selling of his actual packaged products. We placed our PO through Zak for the Venom bushings for Paris, and I started working on his packaging for the packs. We ran the Concrete Wave add and started getting ready to give Venom a full page space in our Resource catalog that was to be distributed to shops and distributors around the world. From the beginning Zak expressed concern that he felt he had no control of his company and that he felt like we were kinda running the show. I’ll admit, in a way we were. We had to though. Why put Venom in our trucks if it wasn’t going to be backed up with great marketing and a good sales plan? Zak had final say in everything we put out with Venom. If he didn’t like it we wouldn’t produce it. So he had full control of what we did. However, he is young and also needed to be taught most everything so he pretty much just said yeah to everything I did for him. All we were doing was making sure that the Venom branding would be treated with the same regard as Paris. It needed to be at a higher standard that Zak wasn't capable of producing. He was generally stoked on everything that we were putting out. To his defense, he was THE MAN behind Venom. All respect due to him, he worked on the formula in his garage, he rode and tested it, and he launched it a while before we came along. All things I give Zak full credit for and I never tried to take away from him. All we were doing was trying to make sure that Venom would be marketed and sold properly. We also had to buy all the packaging materials and parts to make everything up front because he had no money. That’s why Venom doesn’t come packaged or with washers anymore...
So, there we were moving right along... OEM bushings were on the way to our factory for truck production, packaging and multiple duro bushings were on order and the official re-launch of Venom was scheduled to hit the front page of well the respected Silverfish website. We photographed all his bushings for shop and company websites, I laid out the whole launch article along with E Basils help for Silverfish and it was about to be on! Shortly after the Silverfish launch Zak started getting really weary of our deal. He hired (or got) a skateboarding business consultant to help him sort out the deal that was pretty much already in place. All of a sudden the deal was unsatisfactory to Zak (or his consultant). They wanted all sorts of stuff changed. Like the ability to sell direct, and the ability to change the name in certain countries if they, say sold to Argentina. They actually wanted to change the name to something different then VENOM because according the consultant (who I won’t name) “people in other countries might not understand what Venom means”. All this crazy stuff on top of basically telling me that they wanted the right to compete directly with us over seas. That was all it took to make me weary of putting his bushings in our catalog. He was pretty much telling me that he wanted the right to compete with us and sell direct. Pretty much saying, I know we have an awesome agreement but now I’m want to compete against you, my biggest ally. All the while I was supposed to be stoked on marketing his company? I dunno man, sounded lame to me.
So our agreement was fast becoming a nightmare. In that time period, I had switched all my bushings to Venom, I had placed a Concrete wave add boasting the new stock bushings and all hell was breaking loose! We started selling bushing packs and they were selling great as expected. Catalog deadline was getting close and I started getting real nervous about Zak’s new found glory and asked Zak to sign a contract that we pretty much wrote up together. That process is WAY to crazy to get into... He was asking me to prove to him that we were worthy of selling his packaged bushings. I understood his concern, but at that point the dude had been selling bushings out if his garage and had no real idea of what he was even asking. To me it was all ego. No offence to Zak, but he was in no position to ask me to prove anything to him. We took his company and made it worth 100 times what it was worth 6 months earlier. Even after all we did for him at that point he was acting as if he could do better. Or at least that was my feeling on it. So after 2-3 different versions of a contract I ended up bending on so many factors in the contract in order to save the deal, it was pretty much a joke! Offering things like a 2 year deal instead, I gave him right to sell to other countries, etc... but in the end I THEN asked him for at least a 1 year exclusive on OEM for PARIS. That would at least give us the advantage of being the only truck company using Venom. He didn’t agree to that either so after many LONG emails explaining to him how distribution agreements work and why I wasn’t asking anything out of the ordinary I finally came to realization that it wasn’t going to workout. Minutes before he boarded a plane to Cali I told him I was over him and his inflated ego. I was really bummed. All the work we had done was for nothing, lame! Zak being Zak couldn’t care less. I now understand him more and realize that he just doesn’t know any better. He just couldn’t see that I was working for him and that I wouldn’t do anything to screw him over. Yes, Resource was going to profit from Venom but in turn Zak would’ve made a seriously great living. I would've helped him branch off into other avenues and hopefully we’d all live happily ever after. Many people that deal with me on a business level know that Zak truly blew it. Towards the end I even got emails from people that personally know Zak and told me he was was going through some serious attitude changes and some of them were seriously bummed he wasn’t going to be working with me.
Days after my last conversation with Zak I was at a serious crossroad. How am I going to get bushings for Paris? Once I started with such a great product I couldn’t go back. I did what I thought was fair. I contacted the polymer company directly and told them that I was the one responsible for Zaks large purchases and that I needed a ton of bushings for future orders. They contacted Zak and Zak gave them the go ahead to sell to me. I thought it was funny because I knew full well they weren’t going to turn down 15-20k orders no matter what. The only stipulation was that I couldn’t use the Venom colors, which is why the new Paris stock bushings are back to the wine red color. I then contacted all my accounts to let them know the deal went sour. Needless to say, they were all very disappointed and worried that Venom bushings would now be a hard to find item. Which is now the case. I talked to Zak one more time and we agreed that both of us would go our separate ways and try our best not the slander one another... Zak even told me I could use the Venom name if I wanted. Truth is I didn’t. I was pissed, no doubt about it. BUT I still needed to let people know that it was the same formula which I did so on a case by case basis. Customers mostly. I’ve seen banter here and there but I never really interjected until now.
Weeks and even months after the demise of Paris and Venom deal I had TONS of my customers calling me asking me when I was going to start making bushing packs because they were in desperate need of the bushings and Zak wasn’t getting back to any of them. F@$king tragic if you ask me, but I knew it was going to happen. I did my very best to NOT make any other bushings except the stock ones but after months of people asking I finally made some BULK bushings for some of my best customers. I will be launching a new bushing company soon but certainly not with Zak’s formula. I don’t think its right to start a new brand using his formula and call it my own. Truth is it’s not the best formula it can be anyway. It’s damn good, but we can do better and soon you will all get to ride the new bushings and judge for yourselves.
I’m sure there is tons more stuff I’m leaving out but I will do my best to answer any question you guys have regarding this topic. Feel free to post a comment or PM me if you want. Hope this post has been helpful.
Thanks,
Joey@Paris Truck Co.
This was taken from one of the forums, Joey from Paris Trucks has posted up his rebuttal to Zak's claims of 'Fake Bushings':
Zaks ranting makes me giggle. Here's the real deal with our stock bushings. This is my side of the story and I'll try and make it as clear as possible. There's obviously a lot more details involved but that's personal business between Zak and I. Since Zak feels the need to lie about certain aspects of the transaction I feel it’s now necessary to defend myself. The bushings we are using are in fact the same formula as Venom bushings. Zak doesn’t own the formula, and doesn’t have the the sole rights to the formula at all. The polymer company owns it and they have agreed to sell it to me for use in Paris Trucks. All due respect to Zak, but unless you bring a chemical formula to the polymer company that is 100% brand new it isn’t truly a unique and patentable formula. Mixing 2 part formulas together in the garage doesn’t exactly warrant a patentable product. So save the drama for your momma. The Paris stock formula is exactly the same as Venoms.
This is my side of this issue...
We were looking to find another option for our stock bushings so I was happy to find out about this kid Zak that was developing a new bushing company. Zak and Venom’s contact info came to us through a mutual friend in CO who told me that the Venom bushings were great and felt especially amazing in Paris trucks so I contacted Zak and began a dialog. My idea was to add branded bushings to Paris so that we could have a better USA made bushing and use an already existing small company instead of starting our own brand. I like the idea of helping a small company with a good reputation to help build it up rather then keep starting more companies further saturating the market. He sent me a bunch of his hand poured Venom bushings, we tested them and really liked them a lot. I then promised Zak OEM orders for Paris based on professionally produced bushings in the same formula. I also stipulated to him that I wanted to help him market and sell his bushings exclusively through Resource Distribution. He was into it and agreed, so I sent him over our stock bushings for the polymer company to make the molds. We’ve all seen Zaks hand poured bushings they work well, but are in no way mold ready! About 3 weeks later we received amazing professionally produced bushings and it was on!
Now here’s where it got complicated... In the beginning my concern with dealing with Zak was that he was a young kid and there was no real marketing and/or sales plan or strategy behind Venom. Our deal with Zak (what we agreed on in the beginning) was that I would help Zak with all the Venom marketing and pay for all the production of Paris OEM bushings AND parts to make the bushings packs for individual sale. My other stipulation was that Resource Distribution was to be the sole distributor of all Venom packaged products. Meaning we would pay for the product, stock, and sell all Venom products with the Venom Logo and formula direct from Costa Mesa, Ca to the USA and ALL other countries of the world. So anybody that needed Venom packaged products would have to buy them from us. Sounded fair to me because we were essentially paying for, running and helping to market his company for him. We originally asked for a 5 year deal in order to protect our time and investment. Now, in the beginning he was more then happy to do enter into this verbal agreement. And why wouldn’t he be? All he had to do is be the owner of Venom, ride his skateboard, tour the world, do R and D and collect money. Oh, and he was also allowed to sell OEM direct to who ever he wanted too. Without our consent or permission. He also be the sole owner of Venom. That’s right, 100% owned by Zak Maytum, as it was when we first started. Pretty good deal I thought. Since I did the new cobra logo, packaging, and most of the actual good branding that was out there for a bit (shooting bushings on the carpet isn't all that good in my opinion), Zak wouldn’t own the logo and it’s branding aspects till the first 5 years of the contract was up. After 5 years if Zak wasn’t happy with our arrangement he could take Venom and all its branding aspect and bail. Free of charge. After all, we needed time to develop the brand and get it into the market place. I knew that after 5 years Zak would be stoked and renegotiate another 5 years. When Zak later reneged on our deal he lost the rights to the Cobra logo, so that’s why he is no longer using it, along with any packaging I produced for him. I did offer it to him at a price, but he couldn’t afford it so on the shelf it sits...
Now all this was fine and dandy in the beginning with Zak, before we really started getting into the selling of his actual packaged products. We placed our PO through Zak for the Venom bushings for Paris, and I started working on his packaging for the packs. We ran the Concrete Wave add and started getting ready to give Venom a full page space in our Resource catalog that was to be distributed to shops and distributors around the world. From the beginning Zak expressed concern that he felt he had no control of his company and that he felt like we were kinda running the show. I’ll admit, in a way we were. We had to though. Why put Venom in our trucks if it wasn’t going to be backed up with great marketing and a good sales plan? Zak had final say in everything we put out with Venom. If he didn’t like it we wouldn’t produce it. So he had full control of what we did. However, he is young and also needed to be taught most everything so he pretty much just said yeah to everything I did for him. All we were doing was making sure that the Venom branding would be treated with the same regard as Paris. It needed to be at a higher standard that Zak wasn't capable of producing. He was generally stoked on everything that we were putting out. To his defense, he was THE MAN behind Venom. All respect due to him, he worked on the formula in his garage, he rode and tested it, and he launched it a while before we came along. All things I give Zak full credit for and I never tried to take away from him. All we were doing was trying to make sure that Venom would be marketed and sold properly. We also had to buy all the packaging materials and parts to make everything up front because he had no money. That’s why Venom doesn’t come packaged or with washers anymore...
So, there we were moving right along... OEM bushings were on the way to our factory for truck production, packaging and multiple duro bushings were on order and the official re-launch of Venom was scheduled to hit the front page of well the respected Silverfish website. We photographed all his bushings for shop and company websites, I laid out the whole launch article along with E Basils help for Silverfish and it was about to be on! Shortly after the Silverfish launch Zak started getting really weary of our deal. He hired (or got) a skateboarding business consultant to help him sort out the deal that was pretty much already in place. All of a sudden the deal was unsatisfactory to Zak (or his consultant). They wanted all sorts of stuff changed. Like the ability to sell direct, and the ability to change the name in certain countries if they, say sold to Argentina. They actually wanted to change the name to something different then VENOM because according the consultant (who I won’t name) “people in other countries might not understand what Venom means”. All this crazy stuff on top of basically telling me that they wanted the right to compete directly with us over seas. That was all it took to make me weary of putting his bushings in our catalog. He was pretty much telling me that he wanted the right to compete with us and sell direct. Pretty much saying, I know we have an awesome agreement but now I’m want to compete against you, my biggest ally. All the while I was supposed to be stoked on marketing his company? I dunno man, sounded lame to me.
So our agreement was fast becoming a nightmare. In that time period, I had switched all my bushings to Venom, I had placed a Concrete wave add boasting the new stock bushings and all hell was breaking loose! We started selling bushing packs and they were selling great as expected. Catalog deadline was getting close and I started getting real nervous about Zak’s new found glory and asked Zak to sign a contract that we pretty much wrote up together. That process is WAY to crazy to get into... He was asking me to prove to him that we were worthy of selling his packaged bushings. I understood his concern, but at that point the dude had been selling bushings out if his garage and had no real idea of what he was even asking. To me it was all ego. No offence to Zak, but he was in no position to ask me to prove anything to him. We took his company and made it worth 100 times what it was worth 6 months earlier. Even after all we did for him at that point he was acting as if he could do better. Or at least that was my feeling on it. So after 2-3 different versions of a contract I ended up bending on so many factors in the contract in order to save the deal, it was pretty much a joke! Offering things like a 2 year deal instead, I gave him right to sell to other countries, etc... but in the end I THEN asked him for at least a 1 year exclusive on OEM for PARIS. That would at least give us the advantage of being the only truck company using Venom. He didn’t agree to that either so after many LONG emails explaining to him how distribution agreements work and why I wasn’t asking anything out of the ordinary I finally came to realization that it wasn’t going to workout. Minutes before he boarded a plane to Cali I told him I was over him and his inflated ego. I was really bummed. All the work we had done was for nothing, lame! Zak being Zak couldn’t care less. I now understand him more and realize that he just doesn’t know any better. He just couldn’t see that I was working for him and that I wouldn’t do anything to screw him over. Yes, Resource was going to profit from Venom but in turn Zak would’ve made a seriously great living. I would've helped him branch off into other avenues and hopefully we’d all live happily ever after. Many people that deal with me on a business level know that Zak truly blew it. Towards the end I even got emails from people that personally know Zak and told me he was was going through some serious attitude changes and some of them were seriously bummed he wasn’t going to be working with me.
Days after my last conversation with Zak I was at a serious crossroad. How am I going to get bushings for Paris? Once I started with such a great product I couldn’t go back. I did what I thought was fair. I contacted the polymer company directly and told them that I was the one responsible for Zaks large purchases and that I needed a ton of bushings for future orders. They contacted Zak and Zak gave them the go ahead to sell to me. I thought it was funny because I knew full well they weren’t going to turn down 15-20k orders no matter what. The only stipulation was that I couldn’t use the Venom colors, which is why the new Paris stock bushings are back to the wine red color. I then contacted all my accounts to let them know the deal went sour. Needless to say, they were all very disappointed and worried that Venom bushings would now be a hard to find item. Which is now the case. I talked to Zak one more time and we agreed that both of us would go our separate ways and try our best not the slander one another... Zak even told me I could use the Venom name if I wanted. Truth is I didn’t. I was pissed, no doubt about it. BUT I still needed to let people know that it was the same formula which I did so on a case by case basis. Customers mostly. I’ve seen banter here and there but I never really interjected until now.
Weeks and even months after the demise of Paris and Venom deal I had TONS of my customers calling me asking me when I was going to start making bushing packs because they were in desperate need of the bushings and Zak wasn’t getting back to any of them. F@$king tragic if you ask me, but I knew it was going to happen. I did my very best to NOT make any other bushings except the stock ones but after months of people asking I finally made some BULK bushings for some of my best customers. I will be launching a new bushing company soon but certainly not with Zak’s formula. I don’t think its right to start a new brand using his formula and call it my own. Truth is it’s not the best formula it can be anyway. It’s damn good, but we can do better and soon you will all get to ride the new bushings and judge for yourselves.
I’m sure there is tons more stuff I’m leaving out but I will do my best to answer any question you guys have regarding this topic. Feel free to post a comment or PM me if you want. Hope this post has been helpful.
Thanks,
Joey@Paris Truck Co.
Views: 253
Replies to This Discussion
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Premium MemberPermalink Reply by Toby on -
are the ones on daddies the real deal???? cus i got mine there
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Premium MemberPermalink Reply by Fitz on -
Michael English said:
how do the new retro ones compare to venom??
Reflex barrels are the bomb! Ado has a shitload of them in all duro's
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Permalink Reply by Hop on
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Venom is not out of business, it would be like saying Zak will not skating anymore ... never going to happen.
Venom's will be back in stock at the Hopshop very very soon. All types, all duro's and a few little surprises as well. But you'll have to wait :-)
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Permalink Reply by AHA on
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Good news, Goliath have secured a batch of Venom Bushings and wheels. We have also bought in a few Madrid racing decks including Zac's signature model. Supply will be available through Hopkins and select specialty skate stores.
Hop said:Venom is not out of business, it would be like saying Zak will not skating anymore ... never going to happen.
Venom's will be back in stock at the Hopshop very very soon. All types, all duro's and a few little surprises as well. But you'll have to wait :-) - Attachments:
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