A "non-Pro" Kennex?

Sanglier

Sanglier

Professional
Newbie here. My sincere apologies if this topic has been covered elsewhere in the forum. Searching for this racquet by name only brought up posts mentioning the "normal" Black Ace.

My personal experience with racquets only goes back to about 1980. As far as I can remember, the Kennex brand has always had the "Pro" suffix attached to it, which I once thought was rather pretentious and off-putting in some ways, given the brand's virtual absence from the pro circuit. However, I became a fan of their "Ace" racquets after spending a couple of years in the mid '80s working in a tennis and ski shop...

Last week, I came across this beat-up stick at a Goodwill store and was quite intrigued by what I saw. Here it is next to a normal Black Ace:

KennexProAm.jpg



Clearly, if this Black Ace "II" was not made to look like the real thing to fool buyers, then it must have been a legitimate sibling of the latter somehow. It has a (bumperless) standard-sized head and is actually a hair longer than the Black Ace, so it cannot really be mistaken for the latter when viewed within 5 ft (provided that the viewer knew what the real Black Ace looked like). I am most curious about the brand itself however - The font used is virtually the same as that of PK. There is even a mystery number next to the small prints in the throat area (replete with awkward grammar and non-American spelling), just like on the real thing, only this one is preceded by an even more mysterious letter "G". The logo on the other hand bears no resemblance whatsoever with that of PK - and is saturated with American pride!

So what is this thing then? A sneaky Black Ace knock-off designed to fool the gullible (but cloaked under just enough differences to deflect legal actions)? Or did Kennex actually go through a patriotic amateur phase before turning pro overseas?

Thanks for any and all input!
 
The name Pro Kennex is actually supposed to have come from the owner's admiration of John Kennedy. Apparently he was told that it would not be wise to name his company Pro Kennedy and settled for Pro kennex.
 
Thanks for the tip, Clintspin! Without it, I would never have found this link: http://cforum.cari.com.my/viewthread.php?tid=1153184

Those who don't read Chinese may need to use an online translator, but the relevant passages basically say this about the origin of the ProKennex brand:

Kunnan Lo (the Taiwanese founder of the company) was looking to expand beyond his successful but low margin OEM business and to establish his own brand. On a trip to New York, he asked one of his advisers about the meaning behind brand names such as Wilson and Dunlop. His adviser responded that those are people's names! Just before they landed at JFK, this same adviser conveniently came up with the idea of using "Kennedy" as their brand name. So it's the airport, rather than the ex-president himself, who was the direct inspiration for the brand name!

As for the logo, Lo wanted it to look American (so that American consumers would think that the racquets were made in the US). On the same trip, he happened to have stayed at a Sheraton while he was in Boston, and thoughtfully converted the "S" logo of Sheraton into a "K" for his own brand, which he liberally accented with stars and stripes - just in case the kind of consumers he was hoping to attract needed additional evidence of the brand's "American-ness".

Just like that, the "Kennedy" brand was born - in Taiwan!

However, American consumers didn’t exactly flock to these racquets the first year. After some market analysis, it was decided that the "Kennedy" name carried too much political baggage and was negatively affecting sales in the US. Lo didn't want to change the logo, so he simply took a cue from the popular "Yonex" and "Kleenex" brands of the period and changed “Kennedy” to "Kennex" (my "Black Ace II" is therefore completely legit!)

The problem was, "Tennex" was a registered trade mark at the time, and the people behind that name saw "Kennex" as enough of an impediment to their livelihood for some reason to threaten Kunnan Industries with a lawsuit. It was only then that Lo added "Pro" (in the “professional” sense, rather than the “enamored with” sense) to "Kennex" to create ProKennex. The idea for this final change is credited to Charles Drake, the head of Leach Industries (Leach is located in San Diego - hence PK's San Diego connection!).

The article doesn't specify it, but I assume the logo also changed with input from Leach Industries.

All of this information supposedly came out of a 2006 Taiwanese magazine article. Given the physical evidence before me, I am inclined to believe that it's mostly accurate. This means that not only should there be a few ‘non-pro’ Kennex racquets around (including the Black Ace), there must be a handful of surviving “Kennedy” sticks still waiting to be rediscovered!
 
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I've have and have had several rackets with just the Kennex name on it. Mostly wooden frames such as the "Number One".
What does interest me is the fact that I have had rackets with brand names such as Sunsports or Taisports on the buttcap and on the front of the stem a logo that stated: Kunnan, in a square .
They seem to be made in Thailand and only wooden frames.
Any idea if that is Kunnan Lo or just a manufacturer with a similar name?
 
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That same Taiwanese article linked above implied that Kunnan Industries was founded in 1967 (when Kunnan Lo was only 23!), and that it began experimenting with its own brand in 1974. I read elsewhere that PK became a brand in 1978, so all those "Kennedy"- and "Kennex"-branded sticks had to have been made between 1974 and 1978. Wooden racquets would certainly have been part of the product line-up during those years, if not the bulk of it.

As for those racquets with a simple "Kunnan" logo on the frame but someone else's brand on the buttcap, my impression at this point is that they constituted Kunnan Industries' core business in the pre-PK era.

Kunnan is not a common name (there is no such thing as a common surname in Chinese), so it is highly unlikely that there was a second Kunnan who also happened to be in the OEM racquet business at roughly the same time.

Making the products in Thailand made sense as well, as Thailand was probably the most politically stable country in SE Asia at that time, was blessed with an abundance of cheap resources, which the large Chinese diaspora in the region had ready access to. Given the low profit margin of OEM manufacturing, Kunnan Lo really couldn't have picked a better place to set up his manufacturing facility outside of Taiwan - before Mainland China became available some years later...
 
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And it's really sad to know the story of why PK ended its manufacturing in Thailand and how the manufactured rackets were ridded of. I heard it from some locals who knew the story.
 
Great research and very nice write-up, Sanglier (are you French by any chance?). I had seldom seen this much background info about the origins of ProKennex - kind of strange, for such a major producer which has been around for a while. Would you know which major labels they supplied as well? And weren't they linked with Technifibre at one point?

They sure came up with quite a few innovative and unique technologies (like the Kinetic system) which were no gimmick. Would anybody also know what the general opinion was about their wood Core Series? Those racquets did not seem to be popular, but I wonder how they were to hit with.
 
Yes, growing up all my tennis playing friends had Pro Kennex racquets.. I always assumed it was an Asian attempt at an Anglo-American sounding name. Didn't realize there were so many gyrations in its history though.
 
akamc, Non, je suis amerlot, mais j'ai passé ma jeunesse en Europe, donc j'arrive encore à me débrouiller en français, plus ou moins... :-)

I actually knew almost nothing about the history of Kunnan Industries when I started this thread last year (as you can tell from what I wrote), and only began searching for answers after getting the hints from Clintspin's response.

Those Taiwanese articles I summarized above led me to many others, which helped to paint a more complete picture of the Taiwanese OEM industry in general, and Kunnan's epic rise and fall in particular.

A couple of interesting tidbits I picked up along the way:

Kunnan began OEMing (badminton) racquets at the same time as several other manufacturers, including Sanhosun (still in business) and Huafeng (an arts and crafts supply maker that had been producing kits for school children to assemble their own racquets since the '50s, and was thus partially responsible for creating the work force that would eventually power the Taiwanese racquet industry towards global prominence :)).

Their first customer was a Japanese import-exporter named Takemae, whose purchase orders fueled the rapid growth of the entire industry during the earliest years.

After branching into tennis racquets and before the arrival of the metal frames, Kunnan OEMed for Spalding (Impact 310 and 444), while his major rivals Sanhosun and TaiwanStrong (also still in business) made racquets for Wilson (Epic) and Slazenger (Vintage), respectively.

Kunnan's break through came via Prince, after Howard Head sold his namesake to AMF and began designing his revolutionary oversized aluminum frames. Howard needed low cost manufacturing capacity, and Kunnan came out ahead of his competitors in seizing that big opportunity. He initially sourced the aluminum from the US (7046 alloy from ALCOA), then switched to a local supplier to cut cost (adopting a softer 6061 alloy as part of the change - it should be interesting to find out if there is way to tell these racquets apart from a playability and collector's stand point), in the process forging a decade-long exclusive deal with the only high quality aluminum tubing maker in Taiwan. The commercial success of Prince Pro is what really triggered Kunnan's meteoric rise, and his virtual monopoly on high quality aluminum tubing in Taiwan gave him ample breathing room to develop the graphite technology that will be responsible for the next phase of his growth.

Kunnan Lo was instantly sold on the future of carbon fibers after handling a prototype racquet at a New York trade show. Shortly thereafter, he secured the service of one Harvey Chung, a Taiwanese native who had taken part in some pioneering R&D work on carbon fibers and resins at American Cyanamide and a number of aerospace companies. One of Chung's major contributions was the adoption of a solvent-based manufacturing technique (unlike in the West, Taiwan's environmental protection laws were not exactly stringent at the time), which was more adaptable for racquet-making than the hot-melt process used in the West to make aerospace components. Kunnan's own engineers jury-rigged the tooling needed to start production, as no ready-made solutions were available commercially. This particular setup, called "filament drum winding", pioneered by Kunnan, continues to be in use by all racquet makers to this day. That, plus the quick adoption of an inner bladder pressure molding technique originally developed in the US, are the two main reasons Kunnan was able to make competitively priced graphite frames that completely changed the landscape of the racquet business within a decade.

The very first graphite racquets produced by Kunnan in 1977 did in fact carry the "Kunnan" brand, but it was very quickly superseded by "Kennedy", etc.

Alternative approaches taken by Kunnan's competitors, such as the braiding and compression-molding technique developed in Japan and adopted by Sanhosun, all turned out to be economically non viable in practice due to significantly higher rejection rates. Before long, everyone was either making racquets the Kunnan way or having them made by Kunnan. By 1990, up to 90% of all racquets in the world were produced in Taiwan, and a good number of them by Kunnan Industries (for instance most racquets sold by Prince and Wilson).

Kunnan's success spawned a huge ancillary industry of mold-makers, cover makers, string makers, decal printers, etc., numbering almost a hundred at their peak. Those that survived the Kunnan implosion and industry-wide migration to the Mainland continue to support the remaining dozen or so OEM racquet makers based in Taiwan, none of whom appears to harbor the kind of ambitions that both made and doomed Kunnan Lo.

Today, Lo devotes all of his time to religious work as the chairman of a Taoist organization. He claims that this had always been his father's wish, but fate had made it so that it took the crumbling of his "empire" for him to finally see the light.
 
Pas mal du tout, les lycées laissent toujours leur marque :)
Thanks for a fascinating bit of tennis history. Howard Head and Kunnan Lo, this is Jeopardy-worthy... My first graphite racquet was an own-label Prima, which I suppose was most likely made by PK. I wish I had kept it.
 
Guy: "Hey buddy that's a nice stick you have there, what is it?"
Me: "It's a Kennedy, it's flexible and gives me good control on my strokes."

I'm glad they changed the name to Pro Kennex, sounds a lot better...and you know what else.....
 
OMG...I use a Pro Kennex and I'm a right-wing conservative! What should I do now? :shock:
 
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akamc said:
Pas mal du tout, les lycées laissent toujours leur marque :)
Thanks for a fascinating bit of tennis history. Howard Head and Kunnan Lo, this is Jeopardy-worthy... My first graphite racquet was an own-label Prima, which I suppose was most likely made by PK. I wish I had kept it.
Click to expand...

It's too late to think...was Prima a Nevada Bob's line? ca 1980s ?
 
Bingo! I'm always amazed at the wealth of collective memories here. Looking back, that Prima was a pretty good player's racquet even by today's standards (thin-beamed, flexible but solid). They even custom-strung it with slick black graphite strings. All I knew was that it was a huge improvement over any old warped wood or pingy aluminium racquet I might have previously struggled with. Back then, Nevada Bob's used to carry some exotic tennis stuff (I really wanted Mats Wilander's Rossignol F200 which they also had but was beyond my meager budget at the time). I guess they only do golf now.
 
Don't Let It Bounce said:
How did their Thailand venture end, and what happened to the rackets?
Click to expand...

"From what I heard", it was about stealing, big time. The bad guys drove in an empty water truck into the factory and filled the tank with rackets!

That was it. It seemed the factory then dug a large pit and threw in the rest of the rackets and covered them up to end its busines here.

Do note that: "that's what I heard".
 
Hello everyone. You may have helped me with a racquet I have been having a hard time finding info on. I use all of the Destiny models and I came up with a Pro Kennex Prima Pro Destiny model. Its exactly like the other older Destiny models. Anyone else have any info on this model. Thanks.
 
A new arrival and an update to this long dormant thread that I found when searching for info on it.
Thanks to Sanglier`s earlier posts in this thread I gained some background knowledge .

A pretty handsome Kennex Pro.480 woodie.:
IMG-20260506-082618281.jpg

IMG-20260506-082648931.jpg

IMG-20260506-082804393.jpg

IMG-20260506-082721811.jpg

IMG-20260506-082710410.jpg

IMG-20260506-082639998.jpg

It weighs in at 374g with original almost unused leather grip.
As Sanglier previously noted Kennex were big on the projecting a U.S.A. image at the time.
No note of country of manufacture on either the racket or head case though.
I have no idea of the age of the racket -maybe late 1970`s ?
Possibly one of their mid-range or higher woodies at that time due to the leather grip,"power pads" and aditional wood flake above the grip ?
I`ll be having a hit with it but will keep it with what I think are the original strings.
 
Yeah, I'd go mid-late 70s, and should be no later than '77 because Pro Kennex was officially launched in 1978. However, on the GraPower rackets, which look similar to the Head Vilas, there are Kennex style logos, but the Pro Kennex name, so there was probably a labelling transition period 1977-79. Moreover, rackets could easily sit on the shelves for 5 years in those days, so it may not have actually been purchased until the early 1980s.
 
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Grafil Injection said:
Yeah, I'd go mid-late 70s, and should be no later than '77 because Pro Kennex was officially launched in 1978. However, on the GraPower rackets, which look similar to the Head Vilas, there are Kennex style logos, but the Pro Kennex name, so there was probably a labelling transition period 1977-79. Moreover, rackets could easily sit on the shelves for 5 years in those days, so it may not have actually been purchased until the early 1980s.
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Idk if it was a quick labeling change either, but the first year of the Black Ace was ‘79 and it was still badged as a Kennex. In ‘80 you see it badged as a Pro Kennex, but the grip collar jewel, and the buttcap are still the old Stars ‘n Stripes K logo, and in ‘81 it finally changed to the stylized PK logo that somewhat resembles a k if you really squint at it, which of course they’re still using to this day. I wish I could find a product catalog with pictures from either 78 to 80 to see if it was a uniform change over, or if they still marketed frames that said Kennex for several years after they’d tacked on Pro to the company name.
 
Y
kevin qmto said:
Idk if it was a quick labeling change either, but the first year of the Black Ace was ‘79 and it was still badged as a Kennex. In ‘80 you see it badged as a Pro Kennex, but the grip collar jewel, and the buttcap are still the old Stars ‘n Stripes K logo, and in ‘81 it finally changed to the stylized PK logo that somewhat resembles a k if you really squint at it, which of course they’re still using to this day. I wish I could find a product catalog with pictures from either 78 to 80 to see if it was a uniform change over, or if they still marketed frames that said Kennex for several years after they’d tacked on Pro to the company name.
Click to expand...
Yep,
the old catalogues and adverts are such a great resource ..if you can find them.
Many companies have changed branding/logos over the decades and many re-brands overlap as they use up old stock of different items .
 
Backspin to the Future said:
Y

Yep,
the old catalogues and adverts are such a great resource ..if you can find them.
Many companies have changed branding/logos over the decades and many re-brands overlap as they use up old stock of different items .
Click to expand...
there was a big, like 8 1/2 x 11 size late 80's Adidas tennis catalog on the bay a few weeks back, and it was the type of listing tailor made to pull my hair out. Because they wanted over $100 for it. For a damn product catalog that was probably free originally. But my mouth watered at the thought of getting high res images of all those hard to find Adidas frames, and maybe getting prices and layup makeup info that I always nerd out about. I can't find the listing anymore, and it doesn't appear it sold, so I guess they just delisted it.
 
Backspin to the Future said:
Y

Yep,
the old catalogues and adverts are such a great resource ..if you can find them.
Many companies have changed branding/logos over the decades and many re-brands overlap as they use up old stock of different items .
Click to expand...

Yeah, oftentimes you see one logo on the racket and a different one on the cover. With yours both being the original Kennex style, I'd suggest up to 1978 as the latest manufacturing date because they would have surely made many Pro Kennex covers as it's the easiest thing to change to the new logo.

I also noticed an updated GraPower with all Pro Kennex labels, so they must have been reasonably quick to change that as they weren't around long.
 
You resurrected my first post here!

Part of me dreads reading my old posts, because there is a perpetual risk of finding something stupid I wrote that I should have left out, despite my best effort to hold my tongue when I was not confident of what I wanted to say. It's like revisiting a permanent record of my ignorance. Then again, we are all here to share and learn, so a progression in one's understanding of the subject matter over time is fully expected; which is why I have always resisted the temptation to go back and erase those embarrassing mistakes, even though this forum allows one to do that with no time limit. Besides, now that AI bots are busy scraping and appropriating our hard-earned knowledge everywhere, I think it's humanity's duty to leave behind as much of our stupidity as we can for them to scrape and appropriate as well, lest these highly sophisticated parrots and their owners become our intellectual masters with more effort from us than from them.

Kevin is right, "Kennex" turned "Pro" in November 1979, so the very first batch of "Black Ace", "Black Ace II" and "Golden Ace" were dedicated amateurs. That situation lasted only a few months however, hence such frames are rarely encountered today. Meanwhile, some of Kunnan's lesser models continued to sport the plain "Kennex" brand until as late as 1981, presumably because he had considered adopting a tiered branding system that was eventually scrapped. The sailboat logo made its commercial debut during the final week of 1980, and fully replaced the "K" logo carried over from "Kennedy" within a year, so all "Pro Kennex" frames made during 1980 and into early 1981 continued to sport the star-spangled Sheratonesque "K" logo.

As for the transition between "Kennedy" and "Kennex", trademark records show it took place in November of 1978. Therefore, "Kennex" branded-frames like the "Pro, 480" above, when seen with the pre-sailboat "K" buttcap, are most likely produced between November 1978 and early 1980.

Here are two early "Kennedy" frames and a view of the progression in Kunnan buttcap designs. The top two are from the "Kennedy" racquets; the third one is a "Kennex" Soft Tennis frame for the Japanese market; the fourth one is the "Black Ace II" that started this thread and drew me down this rabbit hole; the fifth one is a Kennex "G-X" from early 1981, produced after the sailboat logo was adopted, but before the amateur brand was fully abandoned; the last one is a later "Black Ace", when Kunnan was finally confident enough to stop masquerading his brand as American in origin, and fully embrace his "Pro" status.

It also occurred to me as I was writing this post that it has been almost 15 years since I became interested in the history of these frames, longer than the elapsed time between Kunnan's fateful encounter with graphite racquets at the US trade show and the collapse of his business empire. Startups rise and fall all the time, but it's still pretty astonishing to consider how fast he and his colleagues managed to permanently change the landscape of a century-old industry, starting from the very bottom. The same thing has been happening in other industries as well, following more or less the same playbook, driven by similar ambitions and recklessness, while lazy bums like me are content to just sit back and watch it all go by...


rgblKLI.jpeg
 
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You'll have to update Wiki and WayBackMachine, as they both have PK starting in 1978. Perhaps you wrote them before completing your research!?
 
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Grafil Injection said:
You'll have to update Wiki and WayBackMachine, as they both have PK starting in 1978. Perhaps you wrote them before completing your research?
Click to expand...

Those are not my doing. I only post here, and very rarely on FB. If I am the original source of some bad information floating around elsewhere (there are a couple of doozies in my old posts above, so this is entirely possible), it was propagated without my knowledge or input. I have no interest in posting information that others are free to edit.

My primary sources are people who did the actual work, along with patent and trademark records, business registration history, period magazine articles, and in the case of Taiwanese makers specifically, a 2006 study conducted by the National Science and Industry Museum in Taiwan (which, while full of questionable assertions due to its exclusive reliance on personal recollections decades after the fact, still managed to paint a very comprehensive picture of what actually went on during that time period when taken as a whole, especially when cross-referenced via other primary sources). I only discovered this report well after I had already posted the information I collected from secondary sources, some of which might have been based on an unfortunate misinterpretation of certain passages in the report.

It is actually not entirely wrong to say that PK started in 1978, because the "Kennex" brand was indeed created in November 1978. Prior to that, Kunnan's San Diego surrogate was operating under the "DOSS Corporation" name, which was registered in 1974. "Kunnan" and "Kennedy" branded racquets were marketed by DOSS.

However, while "Kennex" turned pro a year later, Kunnan chose to register "Pro Kennex" as a separate US entity 1982, and allowed "Kennex" to expire by merging it with his investment arm in 1983.

Therefore, if you go by business registration, PK became a legal entity in 1982. If you go by name usage, PK came to life at the end of 1979. If you ignore the minor name upgrade (which "cost a lot of money", according to Kunnan) and treat the founding of "Kennex" as the brand's true beginning, then late 1978 was when it all started. If you want to go further back and treat "Kennedy" and "Kunnan" as the first links in the brand's lineage, then 1974 should be the point of origin. Before that, Kunnan had no US-based presence, though he had been making tennis racquets since at least 1972.
 
Sanglier said:
Those are not my doing. I only post here, and very rarely on FB. If I am the original source of some bad information floating around elsewhere (there are a couple of doozies in my old posts above, so this is entirely possible), it was propagated without my knowledge or input. I have no interest in posting information that others are free to edit.

My primary sources are people who did the actual work, along with patent and trademark records, business registration history, period magazine articles, and in the case of Taiwanese makers specifically, a 2006 study conducted by the National Science and Industry Museum in Taiwan (which, while full of questionable assertions due to its exclusive reliance on personal recollections decades after the fact, still managed to paint a very comprehensive picture of what actually went on during that time period when taken as a whole, especially when cross-referenced via other primary sources). I only discovered this report well after I had already posted the information I collected from secondary sources, some of which might have been based on an unfortunate misinterpretation of certain passages in the report.

It is actually not entirely wrong to say that PK started in 1978, because the "Kennex" brand was indeed created in November 1978. Prior to that, Kunnan's San Diego surrogate was operating under the "DOSS Corporation" name, which was registered in 1974. "Kunnan" and "Kennedy" branded racquets were marketed by DOSS.

However, while "Kennex" turned pro a year later, Kunnan chose to register "Pro Kennex" as a separate US entity 1982, and allowed "Kennex" to expire by merging it with his investment arm in 1983.

Therefore, if you go by business registration, PK became a legal entity in 1982. If you go by name usage, PK came to life at the end of 1979. If you ignore the minor name upgrade (which "cost a lot of money", according to Kunnan) and treat the founding of "Kennex" as the brand's true beginning, then late 1978 was when it all started. If you want to go further back and treat "Kennedy" and "Kunnan" as the first links in the brand's lineage, then 1974 should be the point of origin. Before that, Kunnan had no US-based presence, though he had been making tennis racquets since at least 1972.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I wasn't calling you out, I was just pointing out that the Wiki entry has probably been copied from something you said in the past.

Like for all patent applications, there were likely to have been dozens of PK Logo registrations around the world in different languages, and for different legal entities, so it's very difficult to pin down one date as globally coordinated rollouts simply didn't exist. A company and logo is really quick to set up in some countries, and takes years in others; and manufacture to retail times could easily take 6-12 months depending on location.
 
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Grafil Injection said:
Yeah, I wasn't calling you out, I was just pointing out that the Wiki entry has probably been copied from something you said in the past.

Like for all patent applications, there were likely to have been dozens of PK Logo registrations around the world in different languages, and different legal entities, so it's very difficult to pin down one date as global rollouts simply didn't exist. A company and logo is really quick to set up in some countries, and takes years in others.
Click to expand...

I didn't think you were, and wasn't being defensive. I just wanted to explain why I have no interest in touching those platforms.

As far as the registered trademark names and logos go, we can be absolutely certain that PK initiated all of theirs in the US, because Kunnan and his associates were very open about his plans since the beginning to build PK around a fictive American identity, not only to maximize the appeal of his products in the US, but also elsewhere in the world, especially in neighboring Asian countries. This sequence of events is not reconstructed thru data records alone (trademark history doesn't just show when the names and logos were applied for and granted, they also record when they were first used in commerce anywhere in the world, which often predates the application date by a year or more; the relevant appearance dates I provided above were all "first use" dates, not trademark application or issue dates), it is explicitly described in these people's own words during the 2006 interviews. There were even reports of customers in the Philippines becoming shocked and angry years later, when they discovered where their beloved PK products really came from, after Kunnan stopped camouflaging his racquets with those stars and "USA" wording everywhere.

The irony is PK really was a lot more American than its competitors in Taiwan. Marketing was done entirely in San Diego. The resin used to make their prepregs was exclusively sourced from the US during the 1980s (Harvey Chung's proprietary mix). Kunnan probably hired more American executives to work for him than all the other vendors combined. This US-centric brand identity lasted well beyond Kunnan's own involvement with the company, as their San Diego office continued to have major input in product design and development after the brand was bought by Taiwan Strong during the crash and burn of Kunnan's business empire.
 
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