It's time to move on... I mean to evolve!

Summer is here, Canada has been on fire for a moment now, and it’s been a while since I have written a proper blog post. The time has come, as they say. Who are “they”? I don’t know but I am pretty sure they say that.

For those who are new here, or who have never read anything on our shop, I am Emilie, and I literally live in the GUP Tech shop. Other than being Guillaume’s (GUP) life and business partner, I am also responsible for all designs and most, if not all, pedal names. If you happen to find anything offensive, inappropriate or funny, that’s probably on me.

On the verge of celebrating our fourth anniversary as a business, we have decided to make some changes, or evolve, to be honest. What used to be my pride, my task, my “zone” slowly turned into a burden. I am talking about decorating the pedals.

Since the beginning, all the coloured designs were assembled by hand on the pedals by me. Slowly, I became less patient to all the technical issues coming with the task; the cutting machines not logging, vinyl sheets that have to be thrown away because for some unknown reason, it didn’t cut through, and the bubbles in the designs. 

Because I have more and more to do, such as managing the website, designing t-shirts, writing emails, marketing (as a verb), it was time to consider another way to translate those crazy ideas onto the enclosures. It was time for me to open my mind to UV printing. It had been lurking at me for a while, but I had been very stubborn. Until now.

My very natural fear of change was legit, because I didn’t know how to go from one method to the other. But one day, I got so mad while assembling some MWAC that I took a “break” from it and went to redraw my MWAC design, UV-ready. Then, I jumped on the motivation train and also drew the FOAZZ and the VEJ-1:Ze Beet as well. The fear was still there, until they arrived here, and I saw them, UV-fabulous.

This is great but it doesn’t mean I am now completely free from vinyl, because we have a lot of pedals in the catalog, and because the sides cannot be printed (yet?). 

I am very excited to review all of our pedals in the future, many of them are way overdue for a makeover, and to see how far I can go with my creativity with this new feature. This will definitely add a layer of consistency to our final product, that definitely had imperfections that were very hard to avoid.

Stay tuned because we’ll be releasing some new designs in the next weeks, mostly in very limited quantities because the first print is a prototype. We never really know how the colours will end up in real life. What we know is that this new chapter is an exciting one