HEMA isn't that expensive
Opinions on HEMA gear part 2
…relatively speaking.
Clickbait ahoy! The title is 4 words that are due to cause argument and debate. I admit that I feel shame in leaning so hard into the “surprised face with big text thumbnail” level of content clickbait, but I think this topic is important because the cost of HEMA affects the growth and future of our hobby in interesting ways.
In this slightly rambley article I will outline my thoughts on cost of participation, some of the problems around the cost, and offer some opinions on what to do about it. Additionally, it is focused on the cost of participating in full steel HEMA, not using foam trainers (which is the best way to start fencing quickly, IMO, and all clubs should be getting a foam trainer program running to provide earlier access to actually fencing).
HEMA is equivalent or cheaper in cost than many gear-based hobbies.
Based on my little curated gear list, a full set of brand new, top-of-the-line, steel tournament ready, last you for years HEMA kit will run…
~$1,400 before shipping in the USA
This is not chump change. For most people, having this much cash on hand to drop all at once on new hobby is not possible (including myself), so we end up building a kit piecemeal. A mask and gloves one paycheck, a jacket a couple months later, slowing accumulating gear and filling in the gaps with loaner kit from your club. It took me 14 months after starting HEMA to get a “full” kit, and even then I was borrowing shin guards for another 6 months.
However, the majority of gear we buy in HEMA tends to be brand new, top of the line, often made-to-order kit. Even though I did the bit by bit buying method, I ended up with the newest, best available gear that has lasted me years and hundreds of hours of fencing. My SPES heavies I traded and are still floating around 6 years later. My old jacket is gnarly, but I’ll still wear it to park spars when grass stains are a possibility. My Locust pants will likely outlive me, as long as the sweat stains don’t make it too stiff to wear.
When you start comparing the equivalent “new gear top of line” that we are kinda forced to order HEMA to other hobbies, the cost starts to come into focus.
Want to buy a brand new high end gaming PC? $900-$3000 easy, before accessories and monitor and router and games and monthly internet, etc. (and don’t get me started on the cost of a single high end video card).
Want to get into road biking, all top of the line brand new, like the HEMA gear we buy? $3,000-$15,000+.
Want to race FPV drones, racing and whipping through the skies? $500-$1,500.
HEMA gear is expensive when you compare it to something like Soccer, but there are tons of hobbies out there where the price tag can grow almost infinitely. As someone who is deep into the nerdy side of coffee making, where just budgeting for a nice grinder makes HEMA feel affordable.
The cost of classes
Club memberships in HEMA also tend to be extremely inexpensive compared to other hobbies. My local Olympic fencing gym charges $195/month for a single set of classes of about 1-2.5 hours of instruction a week, so $2,340/year. My club here in Seattle, Lonin, charges $48/month for over 14 hours of available classes a week to members, or $576/year. Even more “expensive” HEMA clubs in the US end up in the $90-130/month range, which is not even close to what the majority of MOF gyms charge.
Even doing something that is cheap gear-wise, such as Ultimate Frisbee, can be expensive to participate in. Some high-level summer leagues charge $1,500-$3,000 per individual to participate, and tournaments often charge teams $500 just to enter to be split among teammates. Grab a disc, shorts, and shoes from the Goodwill, and take out a loan to pay for league entry, travel costs, hotels, team jerseys, and more.
So, other hobbies cost the same or more than HEMA, so we shouldn’t be complaining? Of course not! However, having perspective on where HEMA sits on the gear cost spectrum allows us to investigate why things cost what they do in order to build solutions that provide more access to more people, rather than gazing at a dollar amount and shouting “Unaffordable!”
Problem: HEMA has little to no secondary market.
Used gear is one of the best ways to get into a sport. Seattle even has a store dedicated to selling used or wholesale sporting equipment at a discount, and I was able to pick up almost-new baseball gloves for $20-60 a pop. The equivalent for HEMA is a couple of Facebook groups and your local fencing community, with very few options for discounted gear outside of the randomly-stocked SPES outlet.
Because so many single pieces of HEMA gear are expensive, brand new, made to order, and take forever to show up, people use their gear until it breaks or becomes so sweat-laden that it deserves to be burned after replacement. The odd thing that pops into the marketplaces tends to be stuff that doesn’t fit on arrival, or a rare collection of gear being passed along by someone who ended up not sticking around in HEMA. I looked back 4 months in the US Hema Marketplace on Facebook and found one SPES jacket and one SPES heavy for sale over that time. Not exactly bursting with options…
This is a hard problem to solve. We don’t have local outlets that can easily get used gear in bulk to resell at a profit, and retailers like Purpleheart likely don’t want to jump into the market of buying, cleaning, and reselling kit just so folks can save a buck. The used gear market falls more on the community, with possibilities of expanding outside of the narrowness of Facebook groups into more easily accessible ways for people to widely post and sell their own gear. HEMA eBay? HEMA Sales Discord? Something not stuck in Zuckerberg land.
If we build it, will they come?
Problem: Makers race to the top, not to the affordable
For most HEMA gear manufacturers, the trend has been towards expanding catalogues, making more top-shelf options, and increasing customization options, not towards making cheaper gear options along with their typical offerings.
Feder prices have only increased over time, with no reliable-to-receive models cheaper than a Regenyei standard appearing in the US for close to a decade.
SPES has increased prices and expanded from 5-6 jacket models in 2016 to around 20 (if you count different Newton ratings), with AP, AP PRO, AP PRO PLUS, AP LIGHT NG, AP LIGHT PLUS and more muddying up the options.
With every option being a premium option, and most gear taking months to nearly a year to arrive, it keeps costs high and decreases the amount of gear available on the secondary market. You literally can’t buy a off-the-shelf beginner jacket a month into HEMA, upgrade to a fitted SPES AP Light a year later, and sell the intro gear on the cheap. You save, buy the fancy stuff because that’s all there is, run it into the ground over years, and then fully replace it.
Producers like SPES and SIGI creating a “basics” line wouldn’t just lower the cost of initial entry from buying new, but could also likely expand the secondary market and fencers look to upgrade and resell their introductory gear. It would also help clubs more easily create pools of loaner gear without breaking the bank, providing better bridges for beginners as they kit up over time.
Problem: The “budget” gear makers are budget due to IP theft and variable QC
But what about SupFen? They make affordable gear for HEMAists all around the globe!
Superior Fencing has increased the quality and originality of their products over the years, this is true. However, their business is still built on the back of blatant IP theft, stealing designs from established makers with cheaper materials, often leading to injury as the community acted as the QC department during sparring. I witnessed their first version of their SPES Heavy knock offs break during their first round of testing a few years ago, leaving the fencer with a broken thumb (although SPES has been competing in the shit glove market recently, with Heavy quality declines).
Have they improved? Yes. But still, every new product released in HEMA is at risk of immediate thievery and undercutting on price by SupFen. For example, even though I don’t like the Thokk gloves, SupFen is now producing a stolen version of these gloves just over a year after Thokk’s release after 5+ years of development for literally half the cost. This is a terrible trend if we want innovation in our hobby.
There are tons of folks in our community who are putting their hearts, souls, and wallets into RnD for new HEMA products. If you had a club mate who developed a new product after years of trials and tribulations, just to have it be stolen by a different maker and copied for cheap, would you still be on board with SupFen and others?
Do not buy from Shoukat Mfg Co or Piror Pk
I’m not including any links to this company on purpose, as I don’t want to give them any traffic.
Shoukat and Piror are offshoots of SupFen made by previous employees, and engages in even worse IP theft than their parent company. From messaging fencers to try and buy gear to reverse engineer and steal, to copy-pasting item descriptions from other websites to their own stolen gear pages, to photoshopping out logos of gear, to downloading images of fencers from Instagram pages to use in advertising without consent, Shoukat is the worst example of HEMA gear affordability coming from nefarious practices.
How much are we willing to sell our collective souls in order to save a few hundred bucks on fencing gear?
If the big gear makers are not willing to put time into making beginner line gear, then it will push people towards less-than-ethical gear makers more and more. Friends who are investing thousands of dollars and hours into developing new gear are threatened with IP theft and the possibility of being undercut into oblivion by these makers.
An investment in high quality HEMA gear from established, well vetted companies is an investment into the future of HEMA.
I don’t really have a great conclusion for this article, and my thoughts will likely bleed over into HEMA Gear part 3.
HEMA is expensive. But it’s not that expensive compared to other gear-based hobbies.
The problems are not so much cost at the moment, but more that producers provide essentially only “premium line” products, product wait times are getting longer and longer making replacement or upgrade unattractive, and the lack of secondary market these two things creates.
However, we are still in the toddler phase of our hobby, and investing in the type and quality of gear we want to set as examples is important in setting the stage of what we want to grow in to as a community. Buying more flexible feders rather than crowbars, buying off the shelf jackets rather than custom pieces, and purchasing gear from original makers rather than knock offs all move towards developing the gear market we want to see, with room for expansion into cheaper goods.
I hope that some day soon makers will be competing not for their most expensive jacket or feder sale, but rather be pushing each other to capture the beginner market in HEMA.
Good point about comparing HEMA costs to other hobbies. But let us keep in mind that all the hobbies listed are also on the expensive side of things, with a limited appeal base. HEMA adjacent, collecting antique swords or bespoke sharp swords can easily overshadow the cost of new HEMA kit. However, they are better at keeping their value, and they can even be seen as a form of investment. By comparison, HEMA kit needs to be seen as being disposable. You get the expensive bespoke piece of kit because you can afford to do so, not because it's an investment. Suppliers need to offer an entry level product that they update over the years. If we know what we're doing at this point, why is the cost of an entry level feder with a basic guard and pommel more than $100? With the economic tremors these days, maybe it's time for suppliers to have a look at manufacturing and improve affordability in the process.