Say it ain't so: Nelson Paint Co. throwing in the towel

[MrBarraclough]

My local field sells Nelson paint and has just announced that Nelson recently notified them it will be ceasing production and exiting the market.

It is a sad day for the sport, seeing the inventor of the paintball departing.

[Chuck E Ducky]

Distribution issues. I tried ordering paint a few times from them and shipping killed it. $100+ a case to my door. You didn’t get a discount if you ordered more. I have only shot Nelson a few times with hit or miss results. But honestly who knows how old it was or how it was stored. Nobody was carrying it so it was all order as needed in these parts. Sad to see it go because I believe they made the best paint currently and the only paint company to make the rare sizes. Bet the prices are going to drop on the SMG 60 off size shooting markers since they will all be wall hangers now.

[Jonnydread]

Yeah the shipping was a real crutch.

[DocsMachine]

They're trying to compete with overseas/Asian manufacturing, in a market where the vast majority purchase entirely on price, not quality.

And trying to do it at a time when both the sport and the economy in general is depressed.

Sad to see, because among other things it means no more .62 caliber for SMGs (which, admittedly, I'm not sure any field really allows anyway) but at the same time, also not a surprise.

The question is, will they just "mothball" their encapuslator, sell it off, or scrap it outright? It'd be nice if there was the possibility of them restarting if/when the economy picks back up, or of another small start-up buying it and making a line of premium paint.

But the other part is, if they sell it, one of the other makers could buy it up and scrap it specifically to eliminate competition.

Doc.

[jokers]

Okay I say we start a go fund me for ..... and buy the encapsulator then have our own private MCB brand!! Just kidding, this is a sad day I was hoping that they might be making a comeback, but i guess not.

[iamthelazerviking]

Where do I send my money

[Jonnydread]

Fuuuuuuuuck.

A .68 caliber piece of me just died :'(

[Siress]

Same. Thank you for hooking me up with some Anarchy last year.

[Jonnydread]

Siress no prob homie, I’ll have to do some deep digging for next year 🫡

[shooter311]

Yeah, shipping was the biggest problem. I really wanted to buy some Anarchy this past season, but shipping was more than the case of paint.

Even right now if you order 11 cases of their Precision it is $275 for the paint and $350 for shipping.

What a huge bummer!!!

I believe Virtue Ace is now the only paint made in North America (or so their box says so).

[jokers]

Is social Paintball still a thing it shows them made in the US but their last post was in 2018? They are not at least making paintballs everything that they sell is out of stock.

[jokers]

One other thing, I may be wrong but I have heard that Virtue Ace is made by GI.

[cfos00]

Valken is now stateside.

[glaman5266]

As Doc said, it's a huge bummer but not surprising once you think about it. I am also curious as to where their encapsulator will go.

Now we're REALLY stuck with crap paint for the foreseeable future.

The closest field to me sold Nelson. But they also sold it at a huge markup- $88/case for Precision, which is normally maybe a $40-50 case. I won't go back there after their huge (and unannounced) paint & admission price hikes, but I'll be interested to hear if they retain that price when they go to different paint (or rather, if they stay afloat).

[ford]

On board for the MCB encapsulate fund

[JeeperCreeper]

Say it ain't so!

Man this makes me big sad.

[zinger565]

If GI/Empire is in Canada, and I know HK is in Mexico, and Valken bought Hinman's factory in Cali, whose overseas?

Edit: forgot Proshar is in Russia

[MrBarraclough]

I'm not sure where D3FY is made. Their company address is in southern California, but if you look it up on Google Maps the building appears to be far too small to be a manufacturing plant. The paint comes in sealed bags with dessicant packs in it, which makes me suspect long travel times. Based on their location, they could just as easily be trucking it in from Mexico as they could be unloading it off cargo ships at the port of Long Beach.

[MrBarraclough]

I really hate seeing this happen, but honestly I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. You couldn't order Nelson from anyone but Nelson itself (or one of their local distributors) and shipping was prohibitively expensive. Practically, the only way to get it was to buy it at one of the few scattered fields that carried it. That might've worked fine in the 80s and 90s, but just doesn't fly today. If players can't order your paint through someone like ANS or Lone Wolf, you're not really competing for market share. Name recognition gets confined to old players like us. Nelson didn't go for the big box retailer market, didn't go for the online paintball retailer market, only grudgingly served the individual direct order market, and hadn't been an event paint vendor in forever. Selling nearly exclusively through a small network of die-hard field owners is a precarious strategy, it would seem.

And frankly, as much as I really hate having to say this, quality control issues had become more frequent and severe. My home field used to offer two grades of Nelson: Precision and Ranger (thicker shelled woodsball variant of Anarchy). Late last fall they started getting shipments of Ranger that fell below quality control standards. After about the third bad batch, the field owner gave up on Ranger and carried only Precision this year. He ordered a handful of cases of Anarchy back around the end of September to test out as a potential replacement for Ranger. I bought one of those cases and shot it in early October. It shot okay, but not noticeably better than Precision, or at least not better enough for me to want to pay a $20/case premium for it. And as much as everyone likes to wax nostalgic about the quality of Nelson, most other paints I have shot in the last two years have been more consistently round, albeit usually smaller. Even field grade, level 1 D3FY from ANSgear was more spherical. Nelson Precision has had a pretty consistent bulge around the seam lately.

[Jonnydread]

I really hate to agree with you here, but you’re right. The precision I got from Nelson directly was on par with a lot of the field paint in the northeast which is generally fair to middling at best. The Anarchy I got for Slim’s this spring was solid and shot well, but it wasn’t as magical as it usually is, and paying $25+/bag is a bummer. Back in the day I didn’t mind paying more for Anarchy cause it was always 11/10, but paying a premium for B+ paint just bums me out.

[fullofpaint]

I've been playing for 15+ years and I don't think I've EVER seen a box of Nelson paint FWIW.

[Chuck E Ducky]

I have never seen it sold anywhere in the North East. The only reason I know it existed is threw friends grabbing a case and offering up a bag to try. There was an Army Navy in CT that use to carry it I think. Who knows how long it sat for tho.

[AnarchicArctic]

Sad to see it go. Anarchy used to shoot lasers.

[Siress]

Ugh. Honestly, though, I'm impressed they hung in there for as long as they did. They certainly weren't catering to paintball as a sport these last 10ish years. I wonder if they're completely shutting down the paintball side of the business while keeping the forestry part of the business up and running. That could mean they come back at some point, but I won't hold my breath.

Easily the best paint I ever shot was Nelson Anarchy Upheaval (pearlescent shell, pink fill) shipped to the field directly from Nelson every Friday before weekend games. Was it expensive? Quite. Was it worth it? Very. Every bit of their product was quality. Even, no - especially - the packaging and shipping requirements they enforced in the early/mid 2000's was remarkable. The cases were much larger than other brands, much thicker fiberboard, contained fiberboard dividers between each bag, and according to my field owner every single shipment was on an environmentally controlled truck. I believed him because that paint was the exact same every weekend for years on end. It wasn't until the local scene started to die out and he had to stop ordering every week that the quality had a dip.

We either need some new materials brought in, or to have encapsulators in every major city shipping to their nearest field every week... Gelatin and PEG are just too sensitive to humidity. Maybe move to potato chip bags (thin-metal films for humidity control) and larger boxes... FirstStrike would be a viable alternative if fields weren't banning it's use for rec play.

[DocsMachine]

The box store thing was probably a more complex issue than most think. It may have been a simple case of Nelson simply not chasing that down as a market, but it's also possible that couldn't supply that market.

If you get a product into Wal-Mart, for example, basically they tell you how much they'll pay- stories abound of companies having to adjust and cut corners in order to make any kind of profit at what WM will pay.

The other thing is, if WM decides to pick up your product, you have to supply it. Meaning to thousands of stores, each needing X amount of product. It's easily possible that Nelson's production line, which may well have been a single encapsulator, could not hope to keep up with Wal-Mart demand.

The darker side of that is that other paint manufacturers may have already had deals with the box stores, that contractually excluded other manufacturers. That sort of thing goes on all the time- the most obvious one to most people is that you never see both a Pepsico and a Coke fountain drink dispenser in the same store. It's one or the other, never both. That's because there's contracts with the store- or franchise, etc. You want to sell Coke? Then you can't sell anything made by Pepsico.

It's possible- but I also fully admit I'm just spitballing, here- that one of the bigger paint manufacturers, had deals in place with one or more of the big box stores, that precluded any other makers from selling there.

Doc.

[MrBarraclough]

My suspicion (read: rank speculation) is that Nelson, being privately owned, wasn't especially focused on chasing growth and took a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude to distribution for far too long. Their customer base probably dwindled gradually, quietly making their business model more fragile than they realized. And then they were too slow, or perhaps simply too late, to react when sudden unfavorable conditions stress-tested that business model. Or in other words, they probably weren't too many COVID-caused field closures away from unprofitability.

I find it telling that when I mention Nelson paint outside of MCB, the most typical responses are either "Oh wow, Nelson is still in business? Man, Anarchy was great back in the day!" or "Who?"