Orion W.J. was dangling 16 feet above a poured-rubber landing pad, squinting at a hairline fracture in a powder-coated support beam, when the ghost of that phone call finally started to make sense. It hadn’t been a prank.
The man on the other end of the line, sounding like he’d been awake for , was looking for a guy named Sal to talk about “the quality of the gaskets.” I’m not Sal. I’m a playground safety inspector. I look for the places where things break under pressure, where the tension of a child’s weight meets the reality of industrial fatigue.
“The man on the line wasn’t looking for a vibe. He was looking for someone who understood the specifications of a gasket.”
But as I hung there, the cold wind of the high desert whistling through my harness, I realized that Sal-whoever he is-and the guy who called him are both living in the same desert I am. It’s a desert of competence.
The Disappearing Intermediate
We live in an era where every brand wants to “onboard” you. They want to hold your hand through the basics, walking you through the elementary steps of their category as if you just landed on this planet yesterday. Or, conversely, they want to sell you 1006 units at a “distributor tier” because they assume if you know what you’re talking about, you must be a middleman.
There is almost nothing in the middle. The knowledgeable adult, the enthusiast who has spent refining their palate and their requirements, is the loneliest customer in the room.
Brands currently over-invest in entry-level education, leaving the expert with nowhere to graduate.
Take the 46-year-old buyer I know. Let’s call him a composite of the people I’ve inspected playgrounds with. He has been purchasing concentrates for . He doesn’t need a blog post titled “What are Terpenes?” He certainly doesn’t need a pop-up offering him 16% off if he signs up for a “beginner’s guide to dabbing.”
He knows the chemistry. He knows the flash points. He knows the difference between a product that was purged correctly and one that’s going to leave him with a headache that feels like a rusted swing set grinding against his skull.
When this buyer finally stumbles upon a site that treats him like a peer, he doesn’t just buy a single jar. He buys 6. Then he sends the link to 16 friends within the hour.
None of those friends are first-time buyers either. They are the survivors of a thousand bad transactions, the veterans of the “gray market” who are looking for a professional home.
The Failure of the Manual
I once made a mistake in -a real one. I cleared a playground in a municipal park because the S-hooks on the swings met the current code, but I ignored the psychological reality of how the kids actually used them.
126°
Torque Overload
The chains were twisted to 126 degrees. The hardware was fine on paper, but the “user experience” was headed for a catastrophic failure because I looked at the manual instead of the person.
Most commerce is currently looking at the manual. They see a “customer profile” instead of a person with a decade of scar tissue. The experienced buyer is a leading indicator. If you see the guys who have been in the game for starting to congregate around a specific operator, you are looking at the future of the market.
These are the people who don’t care about the neon packaging or the celebrity endorsements that cost $456,000 to secure. They care about the COA. They care about the stability of the wax. They care that the person on the other end of the transaction isn’t going to explain the basics of “shatter vs. budder” for the millionth time.
When a market ignores the experienced segment, it is unknowingly handing over the keys to its own future. Why? Because the beginner eventually becomes an expert, or they leave the category entirely. If there is no “adult room” for them to graduate into, they will find the one person who isn’t trying to sell them a lifestyle and give that person all of their loyalty.
The $6,666 Gap
I remember inspecting a slide that had been imported from a boutique firm in Europe. It cost $6,666 to ship alone. The marketing material was 56 pages of fluff about “the joy of descent.” But the actual slide? It had a 1.6-millimeter gap at the transition point that would catch the drawstring of a kid’s hoodie like a guillotine.
The “experts” who designed it were so caught up in the story of the slide that they forgot the physics of the child. It’s the same with most premium brands. They spend so much time on the “story” of their artisanal process that they fail to provide the basic technical transparency that an experienced user requires to feel safe.
The caller, the one looking for Sal, wasn’t looking for a “vibe.” He was looking for someone who understood the specifications of a gasket. He was looking for a peer. In the concentrate world, that peer-to-peer connection is what creates a moat around a business.
When you look at Pluma de Wax, you start to see the shift. It’s the recognition that the person buying the product might actually know as much, or more, than the person selling it.
The Ozone of Authenticity
If you’ve been in this category for , you’ve seen the cycles. You’ve seen the “revolutionary” tech that ends up in a landfill. You’ve seen the “purest ever” claims that turn out to be flavored with botanical floor cleaner.
You become cynical, yes, but you also become incredibly efficient at spotting the real deal. You develop a nose for it, much like I can smell the ozone on a playground before a lightning storm hits from 16 miles away.
There is a specific kind of fatigue that comes with being a knowledgeable consumer. It’s the fatigue of having to filter out 96% of the information on a website just to find the one data point that actually matters. When a brand decides to put that information front and center, they are signaling to the expert that “we speak your language.”
The 44-year-old buyer I mentioned earlier? He doesn’t want a community. He doesn’t want a “brand family.” He wants a consistent, high-potency, clean product that honors the of research he did back in when the industry was still a collection of guys in garages. He wants to be treated like the adult he is.
I think about Orion W.J., the guy I am when I’m not being a safety inspector-the guy who just wants a tool that works. I bought a set of calipers recently. The first three websites I visited tried to explain what a “measurement” was. The fourth website just gave me the tolerances, the steel grade, and a “buy now” button. I spent $256 there in six minutes.
Fought over by every marketing department with neon signs and “intro” guides.
Standing in the corner for a decade, waiting for someone to stop using the word “awesome.”
That is the power of the “lonely middle.” It is the most profitable, most loyal, and most influential segment of any market, and yet it is the most underserved. Everyone is fighting over the 106 new people who just walked in the door, while the 16 experts who have been standing in the corner for a decade are ignored.
If you are one of those experts, you know the feeling. You know the “eye roll” you give when you see a “Masterclass” taught by someone who has been in the industry for six weeks. You know the relief when you find a source that doesn’t use the word “awesome” or “life-changing” but instead uses words like “residual” and “profile.”
“Someone is always looking for the guy who knows how the gaskets work. Someone is always looking for Sal.”
In the world of concentrates, more and more people are looking for the equivalent of that-a place where the fluff is stripped away and the product is allowed to speak for itself to an audience that actually understands what it’s saying.
Checking the Welds
As I climbed down from that support beam, my hands smelling of cold zinc and old grease, I checked my own phone. No more calls from the guy looking for gaskets. But I felt a strange kinship with him. We are the ones who check the welds.
We are the ones who know that a playground-or a market-is only as good as the parts nobody bothers to look at. And we are the ones who will ultimately decide which brands survive, not by listening to their pitch, but by testing their steel.
The category is changing. The experts are finally finding each other. And the brands that don’t learn to speak to them-without the “onboarding” training wheels-will find themselves very busy selling to a room full of people who are just passing through, while the real business happens somewhere else, in the quiet spaces where the knowledgeable adults live.
It’s not about being the loudest; it’s about being the most accurate. In my line of work, accuracy saves lives. In your line of work, it saves the soul of the category.
