Gaahleri Airbrushes
For those of you familiar with our YouTube endeavours, you’ll know that we’ve recently started to evangelise for a company called Gaahleri, who make airbrushes and related products.
In a world where China is viewed as the global supplier of low quality, budget products, it may come as a surprise to many that we’d raise the flag for this relatively small Chinese player in the airbrush market… but to overlook Gaahleri is to miss out on a huge opportunity.
Whilst the Chinese reputation for poorer quality products CAN be deserved at times, Gaahleri pushes to absolutely obliterate this idea, with a superb product range that has impressed us time and again.
Over the last few months we’ve tried a whopping total of 7 different airbrushes and 2 different compressors and we have a LOT to say about this brand.
However before we get in to it, we need to talk about the biggest incentive to give Gaahleri a go… price.
Their flagship Mobius 0.3 model is my current daily driver for any and all detail work bar the very most tiny and precise. It can create the tiniest line widths imaginable, but with a reasonably high air velocity, you can easily open it up to cover larger areas.
And the current price of this catch-all beast? $60 US dollary-doos.
Now just based on the brass accents, and the fact that this is clearly a bespoke design and not a clone of an existing brush… it might be hard to understand how they can offer such a product at such a price.
The simple answer, as best as we can gather… is generosity. Gaahleri don’t seem to be obsessed with taking huge margins on their products and whilst yes, it’s likely these brushes only cost them $25-30 to make, a 100% markup on a product like this direct from manufacturer is honestly tiny.
Some years ago now I was involved in manufacturing, with our flagship product also being precision machined metal and also coming from China. I can tell you from deep personal experience that being able to successfully wholesale and retail such products, whilst making a sustainable business is NOT easy and it’s very brave of Gaahleri to build their model around value for money.
However, beyond the business model of the company, there’s a lot more to consider when deciding where to park your money.
Gaahleri are working within a VERY well established niche. The likes of Harder and Steenbeck, Iwata and Badger essentially have the market solved, offering products that seem to be able to cater to all tastes. This again, makes me raise an eyebrow and give a little quiet applause to Gaahleri, because somehow, they’re carving their own little pocket.
Whether it’s their bespoke spiral nozzles, or their willingness to push trigger grip airbrushes (traditionally less popular), time and again we see effort from Gaahleri to bring something that is THEIRS to the market.
Speaking of trigger grip/pistol grip airbrushes…
I honestly…don’t really like them. Gaahleri has 4 in their lineup and initially, the first two that I tried just REALLY weren’t for me. There was nothing explicitly wrong with them… the responsiveness of a full finger trigger just didn’t work well with how I brush.
Then they sent me their newest trigger grip brush, the Mobius SP.
It’s a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, this brush. It has a side port, where a HUGE cup can be push fit, to run the brush as a side loading gravity-feeder. However it also can swap that cup out for a siphon-feed jar, which connects to the same port.
Siphon-feed is another thing that just isn’t really for me - I change colours and clean far too frequently for it to be viable in my studio. However in gravity mode the SP is INCREDIBLE. With precision levels that come squeaky close to their precision models, a HUGE cone pattern when fully open, and amazing comfort to limit fatigue, I was frankly blown away.
So when a company can make not only products I love, at a price I really can’t say no to… whilst also changing my mind on products I shouldn’t get on with at all, it’s pretty easy to see from there why I’ve become such a fanboy.
If you do one thing to expand your hobby gear in 2025, grab yourself a Gaahleri Airbrush.
The whole product line is avaiilable here.
Better yet, if you enter the code TesseractMiniatureStudios at checkout, you’ll get an extra 10% off those already VERY impressive prices.
