"When you buy from a dealer they have to make money," Scott explained. The market was telling him these pedals weren't worth what they were priced at.
In August 2023, the relaunch sold 4,500 units immediately — a strong start for a small company. By the end of 2023, they'd moved 5,400 units. Then everything collapsed. From January 2024 to now: 333 units. That's what Scott called a "complete nose dive."
The decision came after months of wrestling with the brand's decline. Dealers carried margins of 35-45%, making wholesale pricing difficult. The direct price point of $99 sat uneasily in a market where similar products competed aggressively."}, {"heading": "The Liquidation", "This is literally the cost of making it," Scott said, describing his liquidation strategy. The company had 3,700 units remaining — roughly half their total production of 5,600 units across all time.
They'll blow out the remaining inventory at $79 per pedal. That's roughly $2.50 above manufacturing cost. "It's going to be quite a blowout," he said.
The website rolls over Friday at midnight Central Standard Time. The entire Ross line gets liquidated."}, {"heading": "What Scott Learned About Legacy Brands", "I really love this brand," he admitted. "I went after it, worked really hard on it, executed it in the way that I wanted — not that that's right or wrong — but it fell off the face of the Earth."
The experience forced a broader reckoning. Before Ross launched in August 2023, there were other legacy brands planned for 2022. One was fully designed — "brand two" — but supply chain issues prevented execution. A brand from the 90s that Scott absolutely adored also prototype and got really far before falling apart.
When a major brand approached him during Ross's initial launch with hours of calls and execution, he had to back off entirely. "The writing on the wall," he said.
Now he's officially resigning from the possibility: "I'm just going to focus on making the best JHS pedals we can make for our JHS fans."
"History is fun — it's my favorite," he added. "But these relaunches are just not smart for my team."
"We were just doing the craziest stuff on the show," he said. "Any silly idea that popped into our head we were doing it and then all of a sudden that bubble kind of burst."
Resources went down. Bandwidth shrank. Team changes came. "It felt like glory days — state champs, you can do no wrong — and then reality hit."", "counterpoints": ["Critics might note that attributing Ross's failure purely to price ignores deeper factors: the documentary-driven launch model may have created an audience of curious onlookers rather than committed customers, or the brand simply resonated more as history than as product."], "bottom_line": {Scott's willingness to share his numbers — the 333 units in a year that broke a promising launch into pieces — is refreshing. His biggest vulnerability: framing this as "the market doesn't want something" rather than examining what he and his team may have done wrong. The lesson isn't just that legacy brands are risky. It's that enthusiasm for a story can easily outpace demand for the product itself."}}]}