www.batwaves.com

I am Rebecca Moon and my husband is Josh Moon.  We are the owners of Batwaves.  We wear a lot of hats in this company.  For instance, I am the web designer, production manager and accountant and Josh is our sales rep, marketing director and public relations person.  We are also the proud parents of four great kids, 2 cats and a dog.  We live in Sandpoint, Idaho.  You can even go to the "Pix" link and see some pictures of us and the rest of our team.  But enough about us, let's talk about Batwaves...

Batwaves is a lot of things to a lot of people.  I can speak best to what Batwaves is now and who we hope to be in the future.  Right now, we are a small manufacturing company that is working on producing our first run of snowboarding mitts.  These mitts are no ordinary mitts, they are the legendary Batmitts.  I won't go into detail here on what Batmitts are because that falls more into the area of "What Batwaves Was" down below. 

We have many goals for Batwaves.  We want Batwaves to grow to be a company that the people of Sandpoint can be proud of .  We want to bring good jobs to our area where precious few exist.  We want to be a company that values our employees and treats them with dignity and rewards their contributions.  We want to manufacture products locally. Yes, I mean products made by people in Sandpoint and the surrounding area.  No, we don't want to outsource our production to other countries to keep costs lower.  Now for all you naysayers out there...we aren't in the t-shirt/hoodie/lanyard manufacturing biz.  We locally manufacture our unique products (i.e. Batmitts), but we purchase the promo items like t-shirts and hoodies (however, we do screenprint all our stuff in Sandpoint).  We believe that if we make a quality product and we operate our company with responsible financial planning, that we can meet our goals and still make enough money to feed the kids (there's 4 of them, so they eat a lot).  Someday, we even hope to financially support local athletes by helping them reach goals of Olympic proportion.

We think so!  You see, our plan is to sell our products directly to our customer rather than selling them to retailers (i.e. the stores that you shop in).  Don't misunderstand, we love those board shops, ski chalets & all the rest, but everyone has to get a cut of the amount that you the customer pays, which means higher prices for you and less profit for the manufacturer & retailer.  Let me give you an example...take a t-shirt that costs $5 to manufacture.  In order for the manufacturer to pay his costs and make a profit, he doubles his cost and that becomes the wholesale price (which is the cost for the retailer to purchase the shirt).  Then the retalier, (again, he's got costs and kids to feed too) doubles the wholesale cost and this becomes your cost.  So your cost for the $5 t-shirt has become $20.  Of course, when the initial costs are higher, the price goes up a lot faster!  So, our idea was to cut out one of your middelmen and keep the mitt prices as low as we could.  You may see some mitts at some shops here locally because we want to support the local guys...but other than that, we're direct sale only.  

Remember what I said about creating good jobs?  Well, that means paying our employees well.  Our seamstresses (2 ladies located out of Bonners Ferry)  with many decades worth of experince, receive over twice the industry standard wage for production sewing.  Then we add the cost of the materials, our overhead and a reasonable profit and voila...  we have the price of the mitt.  So, if you believe in paying people what they deserve and buying quality, tested well-thought-out products....then help us out and buy our stuff!  You can buy things online through our "Store", or "Contact" us directly and we'll get you what you want.  Oh, and don't forget to sign up for our Newsletter (see the sign up box in the far left column?).  That's how we let you know all the latest and greatest of Batwaves!

Batwaves was a company started by a group of friends back in the 80's in Sandpoint, Idaho. These friends came up with the idea that they could fashion their own gloves in order to keep snowboarder's hands warm and dry. Their design was simple, yet effective, and became popular with snowboarders all up and down the west coast. Their unique glove was called a Batmitt.

Josh has been working with Del Sanborn, one of the original owners of Batwaves, to reconstruct some of Batwaves' colorful past. Josh hopes to put down in writing some of the stories that have been shared with him so that we can bring them to all of you here. I'll put it on his "to do" list:-)