Our friend Chris runs a conservation travel company in Mexico’s Baja peninsula. They combine ecotourism with conservation activities to create stewardship of natural resources and strengthen local communities and their economies. Alejandra is Education Coordinator for the RED Sustainable Travel project. The only thing she loves more than watching mangroves grow is travelling to rural [...]

It’s hardly the first time these have been written about online. Designer Dieter Rams, head of Braun’s design team for close to 40 years, had an iconic style that helped define the mid-20th-century aesthetic. He also had ten rules for good design. They’ve been detailed on a number of websites (we provide one at the [...]

Behold! The griddy glory that is ripstop nylon, a staple of the outdoor industry. Nylon has been around since before World War II, when it took off as a replacement for silk parachute cloth. It’s a favorite fabric of outdoor gear designers and pantyhose fetishists. We’ll cover the former here. If you own outdoor gear, [...]

Back in the good old days, before some of us were born and before any of us were designing outdoor gear, REI and EMS were limited to a few bricks-and-mortar stores, The North Face was a little company that made tents and bags and most people spent time outdoors in order to shoot things. Thirty-five [...]

[raw] [slider width="212" height="320" slider nav="none" style="gray" transition="none" circular="yes" autoplay="1500"] [slide type="image" link="" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/21.jpg"] [slide type="image" link="" src="/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/11.jpg"] [/slider] [/raw] Pretty nifty animation, huh? We had to resort to this level of visual sophistication to show off our peek-a-boo daisy chains. They’re there when you need ‘em but tuck away neatly into the body of [...]

At our inaugural trade show this winter, we had a booth dedicated to works in progress. We weren’t really ready to show a spring line, so we showed up at the winter market to give everyone a sneak peak of what we were working on. One wall section was a collage dedicated to sketches, photographs [...]

Packs take a long time to get right. Even as we begin prototyping products for our Spring 2012 line, we’re finalizing the specifications for the five backpacks in our Fall 2011 line. Seeing as we had a wall full of pretty-complete-looking packs at January’s Outdoor Retailer trade show, you might wonder why we’re not done [...]

The white-board chicken-scratch pictured above is either notes from a group effort at defining our target users or secret plans for world domination. My money’s on the former since Nike and The North Face have already captured the world domination market. So who are we making stuff for, anyway. Here’s what we’re thinking. See if this [...]

Hello. Don’t mind us. We’re just designing packs over here. What are you doing here anyway? You couldn’t possibly have heard of us yet. I mean, we’re brand new. Well, now that you’re here, you might as well hear the whole story. We’re a bunch of outdoor industry veterans, some designers (yay!), some marketers (whatever) [...]