You check where your coffee comes from. Whether the down in your jacket was live-plucked. Whether the eggs came from hens that ever saw daylight. You spend a quarter of a million dollars on a van built for wild places, so we assume you care how things are made, and how the people who make them are treated.
So here are some documented facts about the company that calls itself the leader of the van gear world. Not opinions: purchase orders, carrier records, their own emails, their own videos. Before publishing, we re-audited our entire file line by line and withdrew two claims of our own that we judged insufficiently proven. What survived is below.
We are three people. They are a hundred-million-dollar company owned by two investment funds. You decide who kept their word.
The bunker
First, so you know who is writing. Tactic Engineering is me, Gaëtan, who designs the products, Andy, who builds and ships them, and one part-time helper for the rest. The factory is a Swiss civil-defence bunker under my mother’s garage. Swiss houses come with bunkers by law. Ours became the workshop where the magnetic vehicle mount was invented in 2020, and where every original mount is still printed, finished and packed today.
Article one showed, with Owl’s own video and their own archived pages, where their magnetic mounts come from: this bunker. This article is about what happened after we became their supplier.
The ledger
Seventeen invoices, September 2024 to today. Each one answers an Owl purchase order and carries the carrier record that proves delivery. The oldest is for goods delivered twenty-three months ago. Net of everything we owe Owl in return, and net of the two positions we withdrew ourselves: about CHF 74,000.
Not one line has ever been contested. Not one invoice, not one amount, not one delivery.
In months of correspondence, nobody at Owl found a single number to argue with. They found something else instead.
The seven promises
What we received instead of payment, in their own words, with dates.
- 7 May 2026: “I am having my team pull all the numbers so we can make a fair agreement.”
- 21 May 2026: “I will work on the royalty and the payment of invoices.”
- 9 June 2026: “I’ll check with him and see how quickly we can get the royalty paid out.”
- 11 June 2026, the CFO: “I will come back shortly.”
- 23 June 2026: “Once reconciled, all invoices will be paid in full so you should not have any worries in that regard. This is a high priority for both of us.”
- 26 June 2026, the CFO: “I will send you email later.”
- 7 July 2026: “I’ll meet with Dan and our accounting team, make sure all legitimate outstanding invoices are paid. If we’ve made mistakes, we’ll correct them.”
Francs received across all seven: zero.
A deadline of 21 July, set in writing two weeks in advance, passed without payment and without reply. A formal final demand followed on 7 August, prepared with our Swiss counsel, deadline 17 August. It passed the same way. Silence.
The audit
In June, Owl asked us for a favour. Their auditors were running a verification, and they needed us to certify in writing the balance we owed them. We signed it the same week they were not paying what they owed us. Their diligence about our debt was flawless. About their own, their accounting wrote to us in May asking for our 2024 invoices, because goods received two years earlier had never been recorded on their side.
In the same weeks, Owl’s accounting sent us payment reminders, “1st Attempt, Past Due”, on an invoice six times smaller than what Owl owed us. And their purchasing department kept placing new orders, the latest on 18 June, while the old invoices sat unpaid.
All four at once, all in writing.
Meanwhile, on their website
While the invoices aged, our products went through three stages on owlvans.com, each documented with dated captures.
| First | Sold under our name, vendor Tactic Vans, with an FAQ that said: “Owl is the exclusive US distributor for Tactic Vans.” |
| Then | Marked |
| Today | Removed entirely. Search “Tactic” on their site: zero results. |
And on Instagram, their new mount is presented using our actual product in the frame. Weeks after we pointed it out, it is still online.
What CHF 74,000 means in a bunker
A number that size has a shape in a workshop like ours.
It is the powder recovery station I did not buy, the machine that keeps SLS dust out of the air I breathe eight hours a day. It is the insulated workshop door postponed for a third winter, cold in January, an oven in July. For twenty-three months I chose between my lungs, my heating and my inventory, while that money financed someone else’s growth in Arizona.
That is the difference between our bunker and their hundred-million-dollar company: we also have bills, we also have pressure, and we pay ours.
Late payment between corporations is a line item. Late payment to a bunker of three is a heater that never got installed.
We were not the first
If this pattern sounds familiar to the Sprinter community, it is. Ask Van Compass.
For years, Owl sold and installed Van Compass suspension. Van Compass has publicly called Owl its biggest customer. On 3 November 2025, Owl launched its own suspension line, “Arrow”, built with the same shock manufacturer Van Compass had used for years. Archived captures of owlvans.com show the Van Compass catalogue intact in October 2025, mostly gone by December 2025, and gone entirely by February 2026. The old Van Compass product URLs were not deleted. Today they redirect to the equivalent Owl Arrow products, which keeps the customer reviews those products earned under the new listings.
That is not our reading of it. Here is Van Compass, in their own words, on the largest Sprinter forum:
“They knocked off our suspension and cut us out. They copied our A-mover products, our diff skids, lift kits, Baja brackets and who knows what else they’ve copied or are intending to copy and haven’t released.”
“It looks like Owl just changed a few elements on the old Van Compass product listings. This keeps the reviews in place that the VC product earned and the SEO at the top. Many of the images, verbiage and instructions are still ours.”
The full 400-post discussion is public. Owl gave its own account of the split in a video. Van Compass publicly disputed that account. Read both and weigh them yourself.
Dealer, then copy, then delist. Van Compass in 2025. Tactic in 2026.
The owners
In January 2025, Victor Capital Partners of New York, together with New Value Capital, invested in Owl Outdoor. Victor Capital’s own announcement reads:
“Our name stands for victory because we help build companies that are well positioned to win for their people, customers, and communities.”
The oldest unpaid invoice predates their investment. Every promise quoted above postdates it.
What we make of it
We kept our word for years. We shipped when asked, held prices through tariff chaos, prepaid US duties to save Owl money, and certified their audit when they asked. The record of what came back is above.
We are not asking you to be angry. We are asking buyers, dealers and partners who work with Owl to do what we should have done sooner: put every promise in writing, keep every receipt, and count the days.
The originals are still made in the bunker in Tegna. Same workshop, same standards, since 2020. Available directly, worldwide.
Get the originals, from the people who invented them.
Magnetic mounts for recovery boards, awnings, and more. CAD-designed, 3D-printed, and hand-finished in our Swiss workshop. No outsourcing. No shortcuts.
Shop the Originals →Every claim above is documented: purchase orders, carrier records, audit correspondence, dated screenshots, and Owl’s own emails.
Corrections with documentation: info@tacticvans.com
Tactic Engineering Sagl · Via Barbaté 1 · 6652 Tegna · Switzerland
