The issue is sometimes that they have "made it" but they won't let you "buy it".
When the bulky Unisuit came out in the 1960s, the problem of sizing fins to accommodate the boots arose. The response by Cressi was to manufacture full-foot fins, the fins of choice at the time, with big enough foot pockets, in sizes of EU 52 and above. By discontinuing these fins, a useful choice between open-heel and full-foot fins was eliminated, particularly for divers with larger feet.
Diving gear manufacturers often showcase their products on the Web, but won't sell them to individual consumers in countries where they have no distributors. As someone who is keen on collecting and using snorkelling gear as it was once made, I have located items, common in their day but now almost unobtainable anywhere in the world, such as yellow or green rubber-skirted diving masks on manufacturers' websites, but the firms simply ignore letters and emails pleading to be able to purchase one sample rather than a "minimum order" of 500 or more. It's so frustrating that I can order one foreign-language book, not an entire library, through a bookseller and eventually receive it from its original publisher but cannot do the same, through a dive store, in the case of a piece of diving equipment.
So my plea is for the creaky, old system of manufacturers only doing business with wholesalers and distributors, if they exist in one's own country, to be rendered more flexible so that individuals can purchase direct from the manufacturer if there is no alternative. I've managed to circumnavigate the system occasionally by finding a middleman, often by accident, but it remains a risky, frustrating, time-consuming process that only works through persistence and sometimes not even then.
