So I’ve always been pretty DIY, our first website was me learning all about CSS and HTML, doing everything myself sitting in a Barnes & Noble after a long day machining parts in the early days of WMD. This DIY attitude extended into everything I/we did in those earlier years, building boards in house, machining our own enclosures, a try at digital printing in house for a while too.

Alex and I built the next couple version of the website on Shopify, which was fun, a ton of work, and we’re smart enough to kluge something workable together. But we always had limitations or problems that we couldn’t solve. So now, proudly, we have a really talented software engineer, and a cohesive WMD-wide vision for this new website, where it actually tells the story of WMD, and it’s fully functional!

This fully ties into the new version of WMD, doing a lot less DIY, and doing things the right way. We’re working with companies that do electronics assembly to a quality an order of magnitude higher than we were able to achieve in house. We’re still doing the last mile in house, the final assembly and the critical quality control and testing steps. But we’re moving that house to a place where we feel like we belong a bit better: Berlin.

The tariffs, trade war, and political chaos here in the USA has made it impossible to plan. WMD is paying a ton in tariffs that are funding a regime that is doing terrible things to immigrants and women. So I’m taking my tax dollars and paying them to a government that supports the arts, and respects people.

I’m also spending a ton of time doing design work, writing code, and becoming a better engineer through all this chaos. Skorpion is so close to done, I just have a few more pieces of it to refine so that production hardware can be ordered. Alex will drop a video soon, I know we’re a couple months behind on this now, but it’s an analog piece and it must be perfect. I promise it’s worth the wait!

-William Mathewson