You can always put nicer components in something than what come stock in that product. With guitars you’ll find lots of people who replace their pickups or tuning pegs or bridges. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a perfectly fine guitar before, it just means that someone wanted it to have more upscale components that what it shipped with. Or they prefer humbuckers to single coil pickups. Or they want a locking bridge. Or Steve Vai used something like it in 1987 and they are nerds.

People do it with guitars, cars, golf clubs, computers, mobile phones, yoyos, and pretty much every other consumer good that has any kind of replaceable parts.

Yoyo’s don’t have many parts, so for the most part the bearing, pads, and string are the only thing available for an upgrade. We’re already using what we think is the best string on the market, and we haven’t felt like there is any improvement to be made in our pads.

But bearings are a massively divisive component of yoyos, and every single player has their own myriad of opinions on what they like, what is the best, what works best in what yoyos, etc etc etc. So we are shipping our return tops with a pretty good bearing that seems to appeal to the widest range of people, and we’ve collaborated with iYoYo to create a more premium bearing for people who are into that sort of thing.

Yes, we could start using this as our stock bearing in all of our products. It would also end up adding $10-$15 to the retail price, and no one wants that at all.

So, it’s an upgrade bearing.