SIG is an old, long standing company that is near and dear to my heart. I used to drool over their ads in the model magazines as a kid, dreaming of all the wood , glue, kits, and dope I wish I could afford at that time to order and even going to the factory to take one of the tours that they offered. SIG had a major presence in all disciplines of the hobby and at one time were the worlds largest supplier of hobby woods, balsa, plywood , bass wood, and Sitka Spruce. I finally got my chance to tour the facility when I went to my first SIG C/L contest in 1987. It was a thrill to meet Hazel SIG, Maxey Hester, Mike Gretz, Mike Pratt, and many others in the SIG "Family." SIG was a company that was truly built up from scratch. Glenn and Hazel started out by cutting and selling balsa in their basement and garage. As time went by and sales increased, they added more products and grew the company with their own hands. All those years later, I got to see where and how they cut and finished the best balsa that you could buy.. SIG was an amazingly self reliant and self sufficient company, making a high percentage of their products in house, doing their own packaging and printing Doing most of their own metal forming and fabrication. Glenn was the genius behind all of that, and it was amazing to see it all in operation. Walking through their R&D Department, you could see the prototypes of all the great models that you saw in the ads and in their self printed catalog. I think I thought of the line " Is this heaven?" long before the concept of the movie "Field of Dreams" was ever conceived ! But I was also in Iowa at the time! My biggest disappointment was not being able to meet Glenn SIG, who had been tragically killed in an airplane crash several years before.
I made that trip to Montezuma, Iowa for 28 or 29 years straight and enjoyed the friendliness and generosity of the SIG organization and have countless memories of those great times. Time passed, and Hazel and Maxey reached a point where they wanted to retire and enjoy the fruits of what they had built. SIG was sold a number of times, once coming back into ownership by Hazel , but Maxey had passed away, and the company was again sold. I don't have any inside information on what the subsequent owners did in running the company but the obviously tried to stay relevant in the hobby market , primarily within the ARF R/C kit arena. The times continued to change along with markets and such. I have lost track of the total number of times the company was sold. The current owner has tried to upgrade equipment and technology as availability of capital allowed, and we get to the point where we are today, after a very rough 2 or 3 years of dealing with the pandemic. SIG is still there, although not anywhere near what they used to be, but they are still there. Think about some of the other much, much larger companies that have not survived the changes the world had gone through in the last ten years and especially the last three. Have you shopped at Sears or K-Mart lately? General Motors is a shell of it's former self but thanks to a huge government buy out still survives but there are only about half of the brands under their roof that there used to be. If you haven't noticed or are really new to the hobby, the hobby industry has shrunk tremendously. In my area, it used to take me all day on a Saturday to drive around town and visit all the hobby shops here. Now there are only 2 left and I can do it in an hour.
The last thing that any company needs is to have a lot of bad press and negativity spread about it. SIG is not there to take your money maliciously. It has been discussed and posted on the forum here many times that they are a company that is in transition and trying to stay in business to serve those of us still left and hopefully people new to the hobby. it has been posted here numerous times that if you want to order something from SIG, it is best to call them, check on availability and price and do your transaction over the phone. This is what SIG themselves are telling customers. That's how we did it in the good old days! It costs money to keep changing and upgrading a web site and one could understand how they could get behind on that as things are probably changing almost daily. I see Becky ,( who I got to know through the SIG contests and SIG's sponsorship of the early days of KidVenture at Oshkosh,) post a lot on facebook looking for people that have old newspapers to donate to use as packing material. That ought to give you an idea on how far they are trying to stretch funding these days.
I'm sure the easiest thing to do would be for them to just close up shop and board up the buildings and lay off what employees are left, but they keep soldering on. If you want to purchase from them, do so with some due diligence and help keep them afloat. If you do not wish to purchase from them, you are free to do so, that's free enterprise in action. But no sense in beating the funeral drums for them until if and when that actually happens. It doesn't help their current situation and discourages anyone else that still wishes to do business with them. Put yourself in Beck's place!
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee
Topic: Imminent demise of SIG????? (Read 3245 times)