It is not sudden news, since 2011 when they had a factory fire the Hanwei Forge has struggled against a plethora of issues, many quite common to the sword industry as a whole, but others unique to Hanwei’s specific set of circumstances.
Rather than paraphrase, here’s the official announcement straight from the horses mouth:
What happened and why?
We will try to make a very long story short. The factory producing our products for CAS Hanwei was facing many challenges and, unfortunately, was unable to remain open. Since the well-deserved retirement of Paul Chen well over a decade ago, there was not as much energy or vision being poured into the factory, and quite honestly the factory had never fully recovered from the devastating fire it had in 2011. Then as with a lot of businesses, the financial instability from COVID-19 hit the factory very hard. Additional complications, such as government regulations, the war in Ukraine impacting steel supplies, and global supply chain disruptions have further compounded an already bad situation. Many factors aligned to create the perfect storm, leaving the factory with no reasonable path forward. Thus, in December, the factory sent us their final shipment and officially closed their doors.
In short, it was a perfect storm for the factory – but it’s not the end of Hanwei..
While the factory may close, many of its best and brightest workers are moving across to another Dailan based sword forge, Frenchie Jin’s Dragon King. Frenchie was the original engineer behind the designing and manufacturing of most of the Hanwei products. He worked alongside Paul Chen from the inception of the Hanwei factory three decades ago, until his departure from the company shortly after Paul retired. Frenchie was Paul’s right-hand man. If Paul dreamed it up Frenchie made it happen all the while honing in and crafting his own sword expertise.
The dream team, Paul Chen and his right hand man, Frenchie Jin
Since starting Dragon King several years ago, many of his top forgers, smiths, designers, artists, machinists, wood craftsmen, and polishers as well as the majority of the R & D Team followed him into the new venture, and now will be joined by Hanwei’s finest. In essence, the new Hanwei products which are going to be made by the original Hanwei sword smiths once again.
To quote Hanwei again:
What can you expect from the new CAS Hanwei versions?
The first thing you can expect is that there will be immediate improvements and some minor changes that need to be made. With Frenchie and his former Hanwei artisans’ expertise, we can guarantee immediate upgrades across the board with the fittings, finish, painting, polish and wraps.
As sad as it makes us that the original Hanwei factory has closed, Hanwei and Paul Chen’s legacy will live on, continuing its pursuit of constant refinement and pristine quality that the brand is renowned for. We will be able to introduce new products from Hanwei (swords we had been developing that never came to fruition) in the future once we’ve retooled the primary products.
Our plans are to make minor improvements with select models in this process that have needed to be fixed for the last several years. The original Hanwei factory set the bar for what our products should be, we are now granted the chance to raise that bar even higher.
This transition will be very similar to what we did with the Legacy Arms brand last year when we switched factories. We increased the quality and availability of the products. Like the situation with the Hanwei factory fire of 2011, CAS will start with the primary cornerstone products in their respective categories that are not currently in stock, and we will expand from there once they are retooled.
What happens in the meantime?
We have a fair amount of Hanwei products currently in stock, and the last container is on its way arriving mid to late February, which will afford us a small window of time to work on the transition to the new forge. The SBG Sword Store is up to date with current stock information and is being updated frequently as popular items disappear from the shelves. Sadly, there will be some discontinued products, but we don’t know which ones yet. Like in the Hanwei factory fire of 2011, those will be the hard decisions we will have to make when the time comes. But right now, we encourage you to take this time to review our website to see what is in stock because it might be a very long time before it comes back, if it comes back at all (and price pressure is a VERY real thing).
Stock is going fast, so have a good look and stock up on what is left while it is left as the transition takes effect.
