Entries tagged with ‘shows’
Every once in a while I meet someone who really sweeps me off me feet. Well today I met Yoki Gill, Founder & President of Source Vagabond. I have been in touch with other executives at his company over the past 2 year’s, (notably Eran Alony who’s also a really great guy) and each time I sit down with them in their tradeshow booth, I feel like I’m home. They even serve you natural herbal tea and home made organic cookies from Israel!
Source Vagabond makes an array of outdoor sandals and portable drinking systems. But what is really inspiring is that these people “live their values” and don’t just use them as marketing schemes. Their whole story sounds like something you’d find in a dusty old book shop in some far off imaginative world. It is that rare.
Business? While I was there waiting for my meeting, I witnessed, unobserved, a Sales Rep seriously writing down a distributors negative feedback comments on a new product and exchanging with him, his own personal improvement ideas! Remember, most of the time, Rep’s only listen to their “own” words and “nothing” is ever wrong with their products.
People? Well, you can tell when the person in front of you really is what they say they are. Everyone at Source Vagabond looks like they’ve just returned from a 2 week trek across Patagonia – there’s no faking it here.
Back to Yoki Gill, our conversation was based essentially on words like harmony, respect, and education. Harmony, because he has been successful at maintaining a very balanced lifestyle (it shows) at his workplace. He even has some nice stories about the effect it has had on his own employee’s families. Respect, because as he told me, “you never possess that value, you have to earn it everyday”. Education, because doing something on your own is not enough to make a durable difference (for example, preserving the Planet). Is is only when you teach and exchange that the “good” lasts. What’s unique about Source Vagabong is that these are not “clever words” on a company brochure. These are the words and truths the people of Source Vagabond live by.
I won’t dwell on the products because they speak for themselves but there is one object I saw for the first time at this show. Yoki has developed and launched an absolutely fabulous new item that will be for sale soon and that I really hope Laneo can help spread around the world. The object is for collecting and transporting plastic bottles you find tossed away in nature. Alone, it is a very simple loop that you attach to your belt or knapsack and it has a stunningly easy method to grab on to plastic water bottles. It’s surprisingly cool and an incredible statement of who you are as an individual. What’s even more moving is the story behind it, what it is made of and who makes it. This encounter was one of my favorites at the show because they live and breath the same values as we do at Laneo. To find out the details take a minute and their website to read more > Source Vagabond.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: brands, shows
Marmot is another brand at the Outdoor Show that really started taking action in the eco-friendly trend. They just recently launched a major company wide initiative called “People / Product / Planet™” which not only beautifully encompasses the mainstays of a responsible strategy but also infuses the whole concept throughout their product line.
I met with Marc Wachter (Director Marketing & PR for Europe) and he was ecstatic about this new program and equally enthusiastic when describing the new products illustrative of this new direction. In the course of its new marketing campaign, Marmot’s team has designed a new range of products that include frequent use of environmentally friendly materials and recycled products. They call this “Marmot Upcycle™”, which I think is a pretty nifty name and it includes the usage of raw materials derived from renewable resources such as organic cotton, soy, bamboo and hemp.
The product Marc and I talked a lot about (see picture) was the EcoPro sleeping bag series, 80% of which is made of “Upcycle” insulating material and 100% recycled polyester. The rest of the eco line-up is long, so I won’t go into detail (you can check out their website for more information) but it includes many different sportswear articles (over 45), backpacks and tents.
Because both Marc and I enjoy stories, he told me how Marmot was founded in April 1971. According to the story, University of California Santa Cruz students Eric Reynolds and Dave Huntley were in Alaska on the Juneau Icefields on a school project in Glaciology. It was here on the glacier, amongst these students, that the idea of a Marmot club began. To become a Marmot, you had to climb a glaciated peak with another Marmot. One of the rules of the club was that everyone was president. Most of the other rules dealt with the collegiate fascination with bodily functions.
That summer and through the semesters until 1973, Eric and Dave made prototypes of down products in their dorm room in Santa Cruz. Their first products were a down vest, a sweater and a parka and, later, three down sleeping bags. The warmest bag, the PIKA (now known as the CWM) was rated at -45 degrees F and retailed for $168 at the time. Eric did a winter ascent of the Grand Teton in Wyoming with Tom Boyce of Grand Junction, Colorado in 1973. Eric and Dave joined Tom in Colorado that next Spring. There, the threesome rented a 100 year old stone building near downtown that used to be a grocery store, and opened a rental and retail shop under the name of Marmot Mountain Works. They taught cross-country skiing in the winter to get by. Thus, in the spring of 1974, Marmot the company was born.
Colorful stories such as these are not common. It reminds us that there are real people with authentic values and a true love of the outdoors behind companies that sell outdoor gear. I for one was happy to see that a company which started out as a “club” and grew to sell it’s products worldwide; has taken the time to reorient itself along the same lines that brought it together in the first place.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: brands, shows
Osprey just brought out a line of recycled backpacks (called the “Resource Series”) and I really liked their catchy advertising campaign that stood out at the show (see photo). Gareth Martins (Director of Marketing) explained that customers were the one’s that really pressed Osprey for the product.
Osprey Packs was founded in Santa Cruz, California in 1974 and at that time the company was making custom backpacks on a customer-to-customer basis. The story behind the Resource Series Backpacks goes back 2 years when the company challenged itself internally to build a backpack almost entirely of recycled materials. What resulted was a long quest to source environmentally sustainable fabrics, put in place specific quality control systems for these new materials and redesign traditional pieces in order to optimize the usage of recycled base products. Today Osprey produces a 70% recycled product composed of a great deal of items that are individually 100% recycled – such as the PET plastic main body fabric, mesh pockets and binding tape.
Being open about the origin of the fabric that produced this backpack is also pretty new to the consumer world. “Rubbish” is often related to something dirty, stinky and repulsive but here, Osprey makes it sound friendly and cool. This brings me to the importance that manufacturers need to place on marketing these new products. The “social influence” factor is key to bringing environmentally friendly products into the mainstream. This point is especially important in terms of spreading the word. After all, the more people see an object being used, the more they see how easy it is to bring eco-purchases into their daily lives.
A lot of people I talk to in the industry tend to think that “sustainability” is boring. That’s a big mistake. Producing sustainable products is not at all contradictory to growth. It’s just a question of time. Volume (units of sales) will eventually bring down the cost of raw materials, and with continued increase in demand, we’ll start to see more and more environmentally friendly products out on the shelves of our local sports stores.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: brands, shows
As I was walking around the Trade Show on my way to meetings today, I passed in front of a booth that had an unusually simple statement which caught my eye. It said “Nothing is more natural than wool”. Why hadn’t anyone proposed that solution before? Or should I say, why did we abandon that solution? Everyone my age remembers putting on that long woolen underwear in the winter and wishing you just didn’t have to go outside in the first place…, because the darn things itched so much. And yes, woolen bike jerseys weren’t so fun to have on when you sweated or got caught in the rain. But, times have changed and wool-processing techniques have progressed and today, well, the stuff feels fabulous.
So while I was talking with Hannah Lee (European Marketing Manager) of Icebreaker, a New Zealand based, base wear and outdoor wear manufacturer, it became quickly apparent that there was something else besides Hobbits and Orcs that came from the land that produced us The Lord of the Rings.
She underlined their simple philosophy by saying, “it’s about our relationship to nature, and to each other. And it’s about new ideas and doing things differently; being an authentic natural choice in an age of synthetics, and seeing how far we can develop this simple idea”.
Each year Icebreaker procures the best Merino wool in the world, directly from the best growers in the world, high up in the very pure Southern Alps of New Zealand. From there, the hand-picked pure Merino goes in search of the best technology, ethical manufacturing, and environmentally sound practices before it completes its transformation into a hand-made garment. Sure you’ve heard a lot about what happens during the transformation process and yes there is room for improvement, but wool is sustainable and it makes up 90% of the whole process.
I personally think it’s great that wool is making a “come back”. It makes me happy to know that rural farming communities in New Zealand are once again flourishing and that their skills are once again being recognized worldwide. G’day mate !
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: brands, shows
I’ve received a dozen emails from Laneo members since I’ve started blogging about The Outdoor Show. The one question that keeps popping up is – “what are you doing during the 4 days?”
Well, first of all I traveled here by train because I do 95% of my travels by train (for obvious eco-footprint reasons). I left Paris on Wednesday at 07h24 on the TGV and changed in Zurich. From there I took an ICE to Romanschorn where I caught a ferry over Lac Constance to Friederischafen. From there I jumped another train to Lindau, where I arrived at my hotel at 17h45. While Lindau is only about 35kms from Friederischafen, it added about 1 hour each morning and 45 min each evening to my agenda. Basically my days start a 06h00 and finish (after emails and blog posts) around 23h00.
The average day consists of back-to-back meetings (with our partners and prospects) from 09h00–18h00 and filled in between with appointments that I make on the fly with people I meet while walking between stands. The show is a great opportunity to discover new companies – which I do every time I visit. In fact just today, I met with 3 manufacturers for the first time.
In all, I plan to meet around 45-50 companies while I’m here and 75% of them are companies I know from previous visits. I don’t have time to sit down for lunch but lucky enough for me, most of the exhibiting companies offer generous light snacks and drinks. So it’s a lot like visiting Spain, – tapas all day long!
The most demanding aspect of these shows is the variety of languages you have to be able to speak during the day and on a moment’s notice. It causes some hilarious errors!
All in all it is far from anything resembling a relaxed corporate retreat and more intense than I think anyone can imagine; but it is one of the main reasons that Laneo continues to grow. Each year I come here in the relentless quest to get more companies to support us. And each year I make more and more progress. It’s pretty much like training for a competition or climbing a mountain.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: shows
As I was coming into the show this morning, I took a different entrance gate and landed right in front of a giant poster depicting the steps needed to transform a plastic bottle into a knapsack. Then I heard a, unmistakably warm American greeting and turned around to find a very large smile, and deep blue eyes behind glasses waiting for my answer.
Greg Thomsen, President of Mountainsmith, (the maker of travel storage, backpacks, urban and camera accessories since 1979) took me through the whole technical process with passion and determination. It sounded almost as if he wrote the book on industrial recycling, at least in the sports industry.
Did you know that Mountainsmith’s Tour and Day Lumbar Pack is made of between 13 and 16 plastic bottles? Pretty cool huh? Even more interesting was the candid explanations on why the pack is “not technically 100% recycled” because the zipper is not made of recycled materials. But of course my host had a perfectly logical explanation for that and showed me with a paper and pen, how “he” was in the process of producing a recycled zipper and when it was going to be on the market.
What Greg also pointed out was that some aspects of his lineup “can” be made with recycled material and others just plain shouldn’t. We can get a bit carried away with the “recycle everything” craze. I mean what is the real future usage of the article I’m about to buy? So many of us buy equipment and materials designed to survive far more than we will ever venture to use them for. After all, most of us aren’t really going to climb to the top of Everest, or sleep out in the pouring tropical rain while on a 2 month solitary trek. So if we don’t really need the expert version, why not choose the recycled or recyclable solution?
In the end, Greg pointed out that he would be much better off if only he knew in advance what people really needed and wanted. He said it would make a big difference in the manufacturing and distribution chain because the result would mean less waste and a more optimized distribution network. “Eco footprint is not only about recycling” said Greg, “it’s about integrating consumption right into the product, which would really make a big impact on the Planet”. Well guess what Greg …, that’s exactly what Laneo is here to help you with.
Stay tuned for more adventures with Greg.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: brands, shows
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: interviews, shows, partners
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: interviews, shows, partners
This month, July 19-22nd the annual Outdoor Show (Outdoor Sports Professional Tradeshow) will be held in Friedrichshafen – a gorgeous little town nestled at the crossroads of Germany, Austria & Switzerland overlooking the spectacular Lac Constance. This show, along with its sister event Eurobike (exclusively for the bicycle industry) and its cousin events ISPO and Outdoor Retailer, reunite the industry’s leading sports manufacturers and associated trade.
The Outdoor Show brings together close to 700 exhibitors from over 40 countries and has close to 20,000 visitors from 65 countries during 4 days. Laneo is returning to this show this year, for the 3rd time to meet with our current partners and continue discussions with new partners in order to promote our growth and stimulate new commercial initiatives in our goal to restore the planet.
This year, we’ve added this Blog as a means to open dialogue between our partners and our member community on various worldwide eco initiatives. I will be recording Video Podcasts (online videos) daily here on this Blog, with hopefully a very large range of executives from our partner companies. So visit often (or subscribe to the RSS) and enjoy the exciting news as the show unfolds.
Posted by: andrew |
Tags: shows
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