First, tell us why the company felt that they needed to revamp itself with a new logo and other features?

As the market has changed over the past couple of years, and boutique manufacturers have either been bought up, gone out of business, or slowly chased each other's tails to the bottom on price, we find ourselves operating in an increasingly thinning crowd of players. To be honest, the air's quite nice up here. So we wanted to leverage the momentum we've gained over the past year especially. Our ASPs have more than doubled. Our sales are up. Our customers are buying the best systems we have to offer. We believe we're becoming the de-facto builder of quality PCs.

Combined with all the new hardware that has been released and the popularity of Windows 7, we see this as a chance to reach out to more of the market. We want the orphaned Tier 1 customers, the disaffected PC users, the casual Apple switchers, and the XP holdouts to give us a look - we think they'll like what they see. We're customer-focused. We offer beautiful PCs that don't look like Lite-Brites or Voltron. And that's really resonating with our customer base right now. So we're looking to deliver more of it.

The economy is still in a downturn for the most part. Why does Maingear feel its newly announced product will be successful as they are definitely on the high end in terms of both hardware and price?

We've had four record breaking sales months in a row. Our size relative to the overall PC market, no matter how depressed, leaves massive amounts of growth opportunities for us. We just need to find ways to reach out and win over the hearts and minds of those who are still buying computers. And that's exactly what we're doing. The SHIFT is a halo product for us. We're going to sell the ever-living daylights out of it. But it's also going to bring attention to the rest of our award-winning line-up. And for those who may not find the SHIFT right for them may find something that does fit them. And then we're still accomplishing our goals.
How did the new Maingear Shift PC case come about?

Repeated face-palming and collective groaning at the office over the bling, plastic, and retina-searing LED designs that other manufacturers have been foisting upon the market. We're drawing a line in the sand. This is the great MAINGEAR PC trendkill. This is a sublime, refined computer with beautiful lines, fantastic functionality, and tremendous power. And the funny thing is; there simply isn't anyone else doing anything like this on the PC side. So we're going to rectify the situation.

What are some of the more important features in the new Maingear PCs

A focus on GPU integration and cooling. Part of the reasoning behind the 90 rotation of the internal components was to better facilitate the cooling of these monster GPUs that NVIDIA and ATI are designing. Especially when you double or triple up on them. That's a lot of power, and a lot of heat. We're making it easier for these cards to breath, so to speak. There's a 180mm fan that's blowing air directly at their intakes, and their heat sink and fan designs are exhausting the air straight up and out of the chassis. I mean, it's beautiful in its simplicity. And it just makes sense. Furthermore, we've got the hot-swappable HDD bays that everyone loves, and of course standard watercooling. We're also selling more and more SSD solutions these days, people just love it. So with the SHIFT you can install up to 12 SSDs. Crazy. And we support 24GB of DDR3 memory in the X58 configuration.