In America, TKD provides the bulk of the income for all of the large MA companies. If you've been thinking that CMA has a major purchase hold on the economy of American MA, wake up and smell the coffee...or tea...or whatever it is you drink to wake up. There are three main moneymakers in martial arts:
TKD,
nunchuks and
ninjas. CMA is pretty far down on the list, sad to day. It's a difficult market. There are so many variations of CMA that it's hard to sell gear that meets everyone's needs. For example, just look at uniforms. MartialArtsMart offers a fair selection of
CMA uniforms, but there are tons of different styles that we have yet to offer, or have discontinued. A classic example is the Shuai Chiao uniform - we were one of the first American companies to offer it, but we had to discontinue it because it wasn't selling enough to justify keeping it on our shelves. TKD, on the other hand, is standard and simple, so if anything, we're always trying to expand the line of
TKD uniforms by
making stuff up. Such is the nature of martial arts in America.
But contrast that with the fact that we used to have a TKD magazine called
Dojang. It only ran 8 issues until it proved to be not viable. Then we merged it with our Japanese based mag,
Dojo, to form
World of Martial Arts. In 1999, we abandoned that and just focused on
Kung Fu Tai Chi. Why? CMA has the richest history. KMA and JMA trace their lineage back to China. And China has one of the longest recorded histories and accordingly, one of the most complex cultures in the world. In eight issues, we pretty much tapped the sum of TKD history. In over 90 issues, we've barely even scratched the surface of CMA.