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his is a HIGHLY edited excerpt of the final story of the "Rise and Fall" of Abyss that will be released at some point AFTER all the legal issues are resolved.
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By the summer of 2001 Abyss had released the Explorer Superflow regulator series to great success. The first marketing of this product was to the existing Abyss customer database with a 4-color post card mailed to dealers and end users. One of the very first sales from that mailing was for a single unit to a dive store in the Mid-West. Thats all that was ordered one unit. Other dive centers were ordering them 4, 6 and sometimes 10 at a time. For the first time in a very long time tech divers had the opportunity to get a high performance regulator at a reasonable priceunder five hundred bucks. It was a steal. While the competitors were selling regulators for $650, $750, even $1,000 the Abyss Explorer Superflow was making great strides as were the other products that Parrett and Silverstein had developed.
The second time bomb began ticking when an incompetent diver purchased a regulator. The Abyss Explorer regulator was manufactured by Kirby Morgan Dive Systems and Poseidon Diving Systems. Both top names in the engineering field for deep water diving equipment. This product outperformed most anything else on the market for deep diving. With test results blowing away competitive products and high performance divers all over the world using this super product Abyss thought they had a winner.
As the legal documents begin to mount they begin to get the real story on the regulator accident. It seems that a highly trained and experienced technical diver in his mid 50s who was a part-timer at a local dive store had purchased one of our regulators in the summer of 2001. He went out with his buddies without a valid dive plan, and attempted to do a 240 foot dive in a cold fresh water lake in the Midwest. During the dive he loses buoyancy control and rockets to the surface like an ICBM. He claims it was the Abyss regulator that caused him to do this. In one deposition he even stated, I dont know, maybe the air coming out around my head jetted me to the surface. They tried to let the lawyers deal with all of this, they had business to tend to.
By March 2003 it was clear that the regulator problem had not gone away. A new lawsuit was filed against Abysmal Diving Inc. claiming the Explorer Superflow regulator was the cause of this diver suddenly racing to the surface and ultimately getting decompression sickness so severe he had major complications that altered his lifestyle. Now comes the fun. Armed with the best legal team the business has to offer Abyss heads to a test facility to try and reproduce what the plaintiff claims the product did to him. After months of exhaustive testing, the results are clear. There is just nothing wrong with the product itself, but only with the user. Days of interrogatories, depositions from both Parrett, Silverstein, the Plaintiff and stacks upon stacks of documents from expert witnesses costing over $500 an hour show that there is nothing wrong with the product but that the Plaintiff failed to adequately read the instruction manual. Meanwhile Abyss lost its prime regulator product (Kirby Morgan cancelled the OEM agreement), legal fees were mounting by the day, and they had an attorney trying to dig under every corner of the company to find where the money would be to pay his client should he win. Little did they know that any cash Abyss had was already being sucked up by his clients lawsuit.
All of this leads us to where we are today. Since early February when it was clear that there was no way Abyss would come out of the lawsuit Parrett has been liquidating the company, paying off every vendor as quickly and as equitably as possible. The trial was to start in May. If Abyss showed up at the trial the costs would be staggering, just showing up would cost $50-75k and thats got nothing to do with winning or losing. Win or Loose, the cost of a long extenede trial would be devastating to the company. The only way to protect the vendors would be to close the company and seek protection under the federal bankruptcy code. That decision was made. As a result the company changed its focus of selling and put everything on the internet and made it available to consumers world wide. BANG! Sales orders shot up through the sky. Orders began pouring in like there was no tomorrow. It was wholesale to the public and the public was eating it up. Parrett just shakes his head in amazement now as to why he did not do it sooner.
If you have read this so far you have an idea as to what these guys have gone though and what toll it has taken on them, the company, the vendors, and the customers. Abysmal Diving Inc. is now closed. All the inventory is gone, all the vendors have been paid every possible cent that could have been paid. The doors are closed, the lights are off, and the corporation no longer exists.
=====================================
By the summer of 2001 Abyss had released the Explorer Superflow regulator series to great success. The first marketing of this product was to the existing Abyss customer database with a 4-color post card mailed to dealers and end users. One of the very first sales from that mailing was for a single unit to a dive store in the Mid-West. Thats all that was ordered one unit. Other dive centers were ordering them 4, 6 and sometimes 10 at a time. For the first time in a very long time tech divers had the opportunity to get a high performance regulator at a reasonable priceunder five hundred bucks. It was a steal. While the competitors were selling regulators for $650, $750, even $1,000 the Abyss Explorer Superflow was making great strides as were the other products that Parrett and Silverstein had developed.
The second time bomb began ticking when an incompetent diver purchased a regulator. The Abyss Explorer regulator was manufactured by Kirby Morgan Dive Systems and Poseidon Diving Systems. Both top names in the engineering field for deep water diving equipment. This product outperformed most anything else on the market for deep diving. With test results blowing away competitive products and high performance divers all over the world using this super product Abyss thought they had a winner.
As the legal documents begin to mount they begin to get the real story on the regulator accident. It seems that a highly trained and experienced technical diver in his mid 50s who was a part-timer at a local dive store had purchased one of our regulators in the summer of 2001. He went out with his buddies without a valid dive plan, and attempted to do a 240 foot dive in a cold fresh water lake in the Midwest. During the dive he loses buoyancy control and rockets to the surface like an ICBM. He claims it was the Abyss regulator that caused him to do this. In one deposition he even stated, I dont know, maybe the air coming out around my head jetted me to the surface. They tried to let the lawyers deal with all of this, they had business to tend to.
By March 2003 it was clear that the regulator problem had not gone away. A new lawsuit was filed against Abysmal Diving Inc. claiming the Explorer Superflow regulator was the cause of this diver suddenly racing to the surface and ultimately getting decompression sickness so severe he had major complications that altered his lifestyle. Now comes the fun. Armed with the best legal team the business has to offer Abyss heads to a test facility to try and reproduce what the plaintiff claims the product did to him. After months of exhaustive testing, the results are clear. There is just nothing wrong with the product itself, but only with the user. Days of interrogatories, depositions from both Parrett, Silverstein, the Plaintiff and stacks upon stacks of documents from expert witnesses costing over $500 an hour show that there is nothing wrong with the product but that the Plaintiff failed to adequately read the instruction manual. Meanwhile Abyss lost its prime regulator product (Kirby Morgan cancelled the OEM agreement), legal fees were mounting by the day, and they had an attorney trying to dig under every corner of the company to find where the money would be to pay his client should he win. Little did they know that any cash Abyss had was already being sucked up by his clients lawsuit.
All of this leads us to where we are today. Since early February when it was clear that there was no way Abyss would come out of the lawsuit Parrett has been liquidating the company, paying off every vendor as quickly and as equitably as possible. The trial was to start in May. If Abyss showed up at the trial the costs would be staggering, just showing up would cost $50-75k and thats got nothing to do with winning or losing. Win or Loose, the cost of a long extenede trial would be devastating to the company. The only way to protect the vendors would be to close the company and seek protection under the federal bankruptcy code. That decision was made. As a result the company changed its focus of selling and put everything on the internet and made it available to consumers world wide. BANG! Sales orders shot up through the sky. Orders began pouring in like there was no tomorrow. It was wholesale to the public and the public was eating it up. Parrett just shakes his head in amazement now as to why he did not do it sooner.
If you have read this so far you have an idea as to what these guys have gone though and what toll it has taken on them, the company, the vendors, and the customers. Abysmal Diving Inc. is now closed. All the inventory is gone, all the vendors have been paid every possible cent that could have been paid. The doors are closed, the lights are off, and the corporation no longer exists.
