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Design Ethos
If you want to learn more about how these kites are designed and get a feeling for what these kites are all about then visit Viokite.com. The web site is packed with information for flyers either written by the company of from information gathered from Test flyers. The site does not have all the gloss of a retail store, that is not what it is about. This is also reflected in the Video CD manual that accompanies their kites. It is a massive collection of gathered information from test flyers, Viokite own team and some great technical spreadsheets on wind ranges.
Some more information about the people behind Viokite
Kouki Kazanaka who is designer of both paraglider and kite graduated International Commerce and Economics college. He is bachelor of Economic having no concerned with engineering and aero dynamics.
After graduation, he began to fly with hang glider as hobby at 23 years old.
At his start time of hang glider flying, it was initial stage of hang gliding sport in Japan having worst situation to learn since there were no good instructors, schools and hang gliders.
He fell down with his hang gliders so many times without knowing the reason. He made home built of kit for motorized hang glider as called trike now a days. Luckily, there was no serious damage on his body but destroyed his trike completely.
Then, came the big question ' why do I always fall down' This was the moment he started to learn about aero dynamic and designing of light weight flying tools.
After taking long time studying, he found the reasons finally. His control skills were not great but the main problem was due to hang glider itself, immature design and poor knowledge for wing tip stall.
On 1986, the dawn of paragliding came to Japan. Due to so many accidents, he felt the need for a more safe flying tool. He saw an advertisement for a Paragliding school by car towing. On that day, he ordered one paraglider before his first trial. He got one day lesson for car towing and the next weekend, he started to fly his first paragilder by car asking his friend to drive it.
Coincidentally, one of his Korean colleague in his office who has an ancle having sewing factory in korea had just started the production of paragliders for European market. Kouki visited there to see him asking him to sell some paragliders. He ordered more than 20 paragliders for opening a paragliding club/school with his own money.
Tie-up with Lieverman Kaigai who was distributor of several ski brands, he went to many places to teach paragliding to ski instructors before the Japanese license system started. In 1986, he established his own Company, Wind Valley Ltd. with his friends starting to manage the school and our own paragliding design.
Taking his experience of hang gliding and his friend's experience, together, Wind Valley newly designed paraglider had a leading edge. That was biggest and long seller, the FD. All of paraglider models followed this concept of having the leading edge air in takes back form the leading edge. This model also had a symmetrical wing profile to avoid tucking which is one of the reason why there was no wing collapse and better stall. It was a revolutional new tech.
FD was exported to European market under the name of Jaguar in Germany, SilverGoust in France, FD in Italy. Those that were involved with FD in Europe were surprised due to both good performance and highest safety saying this model was real DHV-1 class passed.
But later for our new models, we gradually lost our market because of factory's quality control. Our proto type was produced with Japanese labour, however, for actual production, we had asked Korean and Taiwanese factory by processing contract. Though proto types were perfect to fly with highest safety our final products were not same as proto types and we faced a serious problem. Also, we had a problem with Korean and Taiwan factories since they sold our models as their own brand name directly to Europe. That was the reason why our company name and designer name was not popular in Europe.
This was trigger that made us think that we had to have our own factory, later in Vietnam and the reason of changing our brand name.
In 1996, we produced our own paraglider brand called Artwing in Vietnam aiming at sales only in Japan. Because in Japan we were sole distributor of several European paraglider brands. In 1998, we started to produce such European brands in our Vietnam factory as processing contract. We also have the experienced to produce major paraglider brands like, Swing, Airwave, Ozone and so on in addition to our own brand of Artwing. It was a good experience for us to up grade both production control and design concept.
Kouki had been working in the Vietnam factory with the responsibility for production, quality and designer of both Artwing and Viokite. He is now director of export sales untill we will find and hire proper native English person.
Our brands of both paraglider and kite are unique different from the other brands that we are aiming at on purpose.
Japanese people love Brands. People trust brand name without checking its quality, material and performance. However, for kites or paragliders brands, from our experience of school, distributor, designer and manufacturing, there are a few real brands in the world.
Why do some fashionable brands become so famous in the world.? It takes time and usually the best brands are spread by word of mouth, by people using the product and testifying to it high quality and value. So many companies throw huge amounts of money at advertising resulting in very high retail costs of the product.
Our policy is to produce a good design per proper category like major 3, entry, intermediate and advanced since we know the balance between risk and safety of both kite and paraglider. We can not ignore that beginners use advanced models creating dangerous condition for him. People must select proper tool as per his skill levels. Only 2percent of people can advance this fast, the other 98 percent must follow the clear steps layed down to keep them safe, otherwise people will get hurt as reported in may incidents.
We are responsible for good quality, good and high safety performance designs per category and low cost, letting people buy easily. We think that the brand image and promotion must be dependent on users reputation and distributors/dealers efforts. This is the real brand's way, Kouki and we believe.
Kouki has always said that he is not professional or professional test riders. He is just mere ideas man that brings new designs without any hesitation because he is free from conventional ideas and never sticks to common or regular ways but loves flying and kiting. Surprising enough, he made his own design soft ware for both Paraglider and kite by Visual basic although he never leaned about it in any school and his past career was far from this computer field.
He said:. Design for both paraglider and kite, the most essential thing is to find the balance between/among several confronted factors like tucking vs stall, cost and better quality, high gliding ratio vs less control ability, risk vs high performance, stability vs control ability and so relations on. He said to be trying to find more better balance point. . Viokite models have many new and unique function like CP air in takes, ground control line leash system, zipping size and so on. He said these things naturally came out from his effort to have better balance point.
His design of both paraglider and kite seems to be well-known in the world. Prodigy and ProjectX of Artwing paraglider are well known in Japan as a beginner and intermediate class. We never applied for DHV class (Homologation of Germany). Users and dealers trust our products as repeat orders as their common sales items. This trend is now spreading to out of Japan, too, because by word of mouth people are now talking about our products despite that no advertisements apart for our web site is used.
Viokite now has a world wide distributors network.
Thanks to Viokite for this release
This information was kindly provided by Viokite providing their customers and potential customers with an insight into this new company. If you need any further information about Viokite please visit http:www.viokite.com
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