Paddles are very expensive to design, produce and ship, hence the price which you pay for your Black Project paddle is extremely reasonable. We have cut out a number of business layers and work directly with customers and smaller independent retailers to ensure that markups are reasonable. If we operated a more traditional business structure paddles would be 50-100% more expensive. Standup paddling is a small sport so it is hard to produce enough units to benefit from mass production and gain significant economies of scale.