Our Story

March 14, 2022

My name is Bruce Turner and I am a lifelong yoyo enthusiast!  Like many others, I was introduced to yoyo in Elementary School by the Duncan team.  My friends and I played yoyo throughout Elementary and into Middle School, where at some point I put my old Spintastics Terminator Tornado responsive roller bearing yoyo into a drawer.  

Fast forward to 2016, I had decided to quit smoking cigarettes and I wanted to quit "cold turkey" with no gum, pills, or any other kind of medication or chemical substitution.  So I found that old yoyo!  Sure enough though, the string had turned into some sort of petrified fossil and the bearing a block of rust...whoops.  I took to the internet where I found videos of pro yoyo-ists busting out these amazing tricks, unlike anything I could remember from my youth, what was this wonderous new style of yoyo?!?  I had discovered unresponsive yoyo...but I also felt like it was over my head at the time, so I ordered a Yomega Raider off of Amazon and started yoyoing instead of smoking (this was just over 5 years ago now, and I'm still cigarette free today!)

Let's jump up a few more years now to 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic and "lock downs".  In the Fall of 2020, I finally got my stones together and ordered my first unresponsive 1a yoyo, the Recess Snack!  I learned how to bind the first day and began learning about combos, flow, and the differences of all of these crazy new yoyo that I had been unaware of for so many years.

Little did I know at the time, I was truly rekindling this great love of mine.  I began buying this shape and that shape from this manufacturer and that to get a feel for all the different shapes and weight distributions, to find what I liked best (and to satisfy my inner Dragon...need more shiny things!)  

Next, I came across some tutorials for yoyo design from Mark Diehr of Mk1 Yoyos (links below) and started learning the CAD process for yoyo.  I dove in head first and hit the ground running!  Months later, Mark furthered my experience by inviting my wife, Jess, and I to assist him with quality control and packaging of one of his yoyos, the Mk1 Contact (second run).  After having truly glanced at the inner workings of Mk1, Jess and I talked the whole way home about how we wanted to follow in these foot steps.

Now, to the present.  2022, the year of the Tiger (my year!) and we have finally taken the leap!  Our first prototype is currently being machined and we cannot express how happy we are to finally bring our dream to fruition.  Our goal with TRT is to create fun and accessible yoyos for the community to enjoy.  Please follow along here and on our Instagram page @turnerreturntops to keep up to date with us as we progress towards our first release.  I hope you will join us for this journey, thank you!