Interview with Strongblade.com

While strictly speaking, this isn’t truly a Q & A style interview, it is rather Strongblades all encompassing answer to our request to tell the sword buying public a little more about how they started, what they’re all about, their move towards low priced, yet quite high quality medieval swords and everything else.

Hope you enjoy it!

Strongblade has access to both it’s own designs and those of other manufacturers. The swords that we make for ourselves are made primarily in India, in a place called Dehra Dun (our manufacturer is just down the road from Windlass Steelcrafts, actually). Our swords are made to very specific designs and face a tremendous number of quality assurance processes.

The swords we make have been, in the past, primarily for display and for light sparring, with a few exceptions. We wanted to fill a void between high-priced battle-ready swords and very low priced wall-hangers. Our mid-range swords had much better quality control and design and featured “full tangs”, and sturdy construction, but lacked the ultra-high tempering of the higher end swords from top-tier manufacturers.

Recently, though, we have started adding what we call Brimstone Tempering, which is just a fancy marketing term for a higher end heat tempering technique. This allows the swords to return to true shape after being bent about 40 degrees. It also allows makes the blades a little more rigid and a little more nick resistant. These blades come with no decorative nickel on them (nickel tends to chip when used to spar).

We currently have 4 swords that have this tempering and will be adding another five in a few months. We hope to have our entire line available in standard temper and Brimstone Temper within a year or so. These swords will be a little more expensive than our normal lines, but still less expensive than swords offered by some of the other high end manufacturers. We will also continue to make improvements on our swords as necessary. We are always open to suggestion and critique, and strive to always meet any need that is currently unavailable or under-represented to our customers. Oh, and our swords currently have tapered edges, but are not sharpened. We are thinking of adding a sharpening service in later 2008.

We typically offer a 14-day money back guarantee, although this is a loose rule and we are suckers for a sad story, so we often take items back as much as 21 or (very rarely) 30 days. We used to take all items back with no re-stock fee, but people have taken advantage of this, so we have had to add an optional re-stock fee of up to 15%. We don’t like to add the fee, but our warehouse staff spends between 20 minutes to 45 minutes buffing and polishing each of our SBA- swords. We don’t mind doing it, but we do mind doing it for people who essentially want to “rent” a sword for an event, then return it after the event. We don’t always charge the re-stock fee, and sometimes we charge less than 15%, but we do reserve the right to charge the full 15%.

"Strongblade started out as a retailer. Well, truth be told, we started out as sword enthusiasts..."

Most of us at Strongblade have several (dozens even) of swords and weapons that we collect. We all love swords and history and, not ironically, sword history. So, when we started selling them, we really wanted to offer items that we ourselves wanted. This proved easy at first, but as we gained experience we realized that there were basically two markets for swords… high-end, battle-ready swords, and low-end wall hangers. You either had to spend a lot of money and get what purists will call an “authentic” sword, or spend very little money and get something that comes to you still wrapped in the manufacturers greasy plastic wrap, with the pommel loose and the guards uneven – and that’s if you got it at all.

So, we started producing our own swords, making improvements to some designs, coming up with our own designs, improving the overall craftsmanship of the weapons and creating a new class of mid-range, affordable swords. We also made a decision early on to buff and polish every one of our swords before sending them out. Getting a sword coated in oil and plastic wrap is hardly a way to get people excited about buying swords.

We are continually improving our manufacturing process and constantly seek suggestions, comments and critiques on our products. Our primary goal has been and always will be to sell cool stuff that we would want. We are very selective with what we put on the website, and though we can’t say we’ve made a mistake or two in the past, we are proud of our record with our customers. And we’re proud of our customer service, as well. We have a call center that is available 24/7. These agents do their best, but if they encounter any technical questions, they normally refer them to our specialists, who call back and answer any questions asked.

We pride ourselves on customer service and do whatever we can to make sure our customers are happy.