FIND A SWORD SYSTEM RESULT:

"What's the deal with you selling and promoting a couple of 'SBG' swords?"

I'll admit it, the SBG Swords sold in the online store part of our site might seem a little out of place. After all, our aim is to review and let people know what is out there in a no BS way, and should not be an opportunity to shamelessly promote our own products!

Heck, I'll admit I'd be rather skeptical of it myself, but here's the backstory in brief:

When I started SBG in 2005 I honestly had no idea I would EVER be selling swords myself!!

I hoped that the site would get a few sponsors and find a handful of top quality affiliates, but it was not enough to cover the expenses of busting up perfectly good swords in the name of testing!

We kind of fell into selling swords almost by accident, and how we started by dropshipping a few Cheness swords is already covered elsewhere, but even as we slowly added a few selected products from other trusted manufacturers, there was never any thought of creating our own exclusive SBG swords..

Essentially, the catalyst for this was that at one point, there were many sellers based in China who promised to make some basic custom swords for (previously unheard of) prices. Some of them were pretty good for the money! But others, not so much - and the problem is, some people got scammed, others got atrocious, completely wrong orders - and I have it on good authorirty that many of them honestly don't even care unless it is a VOLUME order and repeat business customer..

By coincidendce, at around the same time a friend of mine in Canada who had close contact with one of the forges contacted me, we got to talking, and I wondered if the forge he was using for some other project would be interested in making some custom blades..

Well, the answer was obviously 'yes' - I designed a few myself, had them made up - and put them through hell - and they did better than expected!

Which are of course our 4 Star Rated $330 Custom Katana line We don't sell them all year round (we batch them up and try to get them made as one big order, for previously mentioned reasons), if there are any problems, we get them FIXED (we have had a few hiccups now and again, but with SBG's reputation on the line, you can bet we pay attention to any problems!). But with the main thing with this project was that we hoped to try and service a need in the community that was not being addressed (or being addressed poorly), help fund the site (though we keep the magins very low on these) and at the same time maybe give the industry a nudge along the way to provide something that obviously a lot of Katana lovers really want (their own personalized blade at a reasonable price).

But the other SBG Swords, the more recently unveiled Professional Grade Katana were designed to help lift the standard of what is possible by just spending a little more money and time making a low cost authentic Katana.

While in some ways we are pretty protective of exactly which two forges make them (none of them make swords for any recognizeable brands, and both are botique microforges) - apart from obviously not wanting someone to unfairly cut in on our hard work and R and D - we don't want either of the forges flooded with so much work that their quality drops, that woudl defeat the point - it will be up to other forges and manufacturers to meet the challenge of something that the sword community obviously wants!).

As is our mission statement, with everything we do at SBG we try to make it so that everyone wins, and feel confident that we have achieved this with our range of exclusive SBG Swords.

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I hope you have found this information on SBG Swords to be helpful. If not click here to return to our Beginners Guide to Authentic Japanese Swords from the find a sword systems page on the official SBG Swords