coLAB

Product Guys - Questions and Answers!

2010-01-06T12:21:12+00:00

In January 2010 we featured an article about the work of the Alpkit product team. The article focused around Petes Figfour dry tooling axes which are due for imminent release, but also touched on what goes on behind the scenes. This post is for any questions you may want to put to the product team

You can read the feature here

Thoughts from Julie Greengrass - Sprayway

2008-10-24T10:38:00+00:00

I’m the Senior Designer at Sprayway, but I’m not a mountaineer and I wasn’t taken out walking in the mountains from a young age, in fact quite the opposite considering I was bought up in one of the flattest parts of the country - Essex! there got that out of the way. The most I did was to go walking in the New Forest on our summer holidays til the age of 10. I’ve arrived where I am from a more creative angle, and the sports that I’ve experience or still do regularly - mountainbiking, running, hill walking, powerkiting, climbing etc all got picked up along the way and I wouldn’t be without them now as using the kit that I design is the easiest way to find new ideas, or find faults with current ones.

I’ve always had an interest in making things, my nan was a seamstress, and most of my clothes as a child were hand made by my nans or my mum, so making clothes is something that I’ve been capable of from quite a young age. I didn’t really think about it as a career until the final year of A levels and realised that to get to a Fashion degree, I needed to do a Foundation course in Art and Design first. This covered everything from Graphics, 3D, Fine Art, Textiles and Fashion to Photography and Art History. I managed to get a place at Newcastle Poly for a 4 year BA(hons) in Fashion Design. This taught me the basics of creating garment patterns, fabrics, finishing, garment construction and textiles. After several work placements during my 3rd year on the course, I was a bit disillusioned with the fashion world and had become interested in fabrics that had some kind of performance characteristics. This lead me to finding out about the Masters in Performance Sportswear Design at Derby Uni. It was only in it’s 2nd year when I started, so was very new to the sportwear industry too. This course took me onto the next level teaching me more in depth about fabrics - their make up and how and why they work, cutting patterns for movement, market research etc I did some work placements whilst on the course too - working for a licensee of Rockport in Stockholm, then for Polaris, then Rox and Design IQ (as they’re now called).

I learnt a lot from the course, but it was still a struggle to find a job in the trade, it took me about 5 months before I started my first proper job. I sent out CV’s to everyone that I wanted to work for and applied to the jobs that I could find. Then I got a phone call from Nick Brown at Paramo, and I was given the opportunity to put all that I’d learnt into practise. It was a steep learning curve, and I made a lot of mistakes, but I enjoyed working there and learnt so much. I then headed North to Montane, and stayed for 6 years. The company changed a lot whilst I was there. I had, what I would class as the luxury of having a factory on site. I could design a product in the morning, make the pattern and then be sitting with the sample machinist in the afternoon as she made it up - telling me what would and wouldn’t work in production. We then started to move production to the Far East as we couldn’t keep up with demand and prices in the UK. The factory in the UK had teams of 4 working on garments, yet in China there were different people for for pretty much every operation. So each person at each stage was an expert in what they did - putting in zips, finishing pockets, hem drawcord tunnels etc Our girls in the UK couldn’t compete on the finishing quality, though not without trying. We eventually closed the factory and moved all the rest of our production to China. It was a sad day. My role at Montane was varied as it was a small company. I designed and developed new products, sourced fabric and trim, chose the colours and organised lab dips, co-ordinated the sampling - working with the factories and fabric suppliers, signed off the preproduction samples, liased with fabric companies for bulk fabric ordering, QC’d the products when the bulk orders arrived in the uk, organised rectification if they were wrong, did the drawings for the workbook, sent products out to Journalists etc etc I enjoyed my 6 years at Montane, but really wanted to be more focussed on design and be less involved in the other stuff. Which is why I then moved to Sprayway.

Sprayway is a bigger company, and I am in charge of a small team of product developers, fabric technician and designer. I have to research the market, the competition, the customer, colour, fabric, detail, trends as well as staying on top of technical developments, then I design and specify my products to send out to the factory and then feedback on the prototypes. I am also involved in writing text for our workbooks, trying to keep costs down, and working with our distributors abroad to create specific styles for them. There are a long list of other things including regular trips to the factories and admin stuff that I do which is all part and parcel of my job.

Working with factories abroad is different. Lead times are longer, and you have less direct contact with the people developing your products, however they do have access to more machinery and new technology that would have been too expensive to buy for our factory in the UK at Montane. Ultimately, we specify what they make, and control the quality from the UK. Sometimes developing something a little tricky is more difficult and takes longer but if there is a difficult detail we will mock it up in the Uk and then send it over for the factory to copy.

Designing outdoor kit is like trying to find an unending solution to a problem, which from my point of view is great as I like the challenge of it. It’s quite rewarding when you see your products being worn, or reviewed or being bought every season by more and more stores. Not sure if there’s anything else that I’d rather be doing careerwise: I’m being creative, designing clothing, and getting out and testing it. It’s a job I enjoy doing and if I didn’t enjoy it I wouldn’t be doing it.

More info here

Thoughts from Helen Roberts - Equip, Rab, Pod and Outdoor designs.

2008-10-24T09:54:32+00:00

“My route into design for the outdoors hasn’t exactly been direct but that seems to be the standard as most of the designers I know seem to have had a unique route to their current positions, working in other industries or with other backgrounds before ending up designing.

I studied Fine Art at university but by the time I left I knew I didn’t want to be an artist and took a job in an outdoors shop for a year while I saved up to go travelling. That’s where my education in the outdoors and the industry began.
I found out about the MA Performance Sportswear Design course at Derby University through a former colleague who was on the course 1 year ahead of me and applied once I was back in the UK. The course taught us aspects of design, pattern cutting, marketing and CAD skills. I did my Masters placement at Rab and have been with them since I completed it.

For me working as a designer now the most important things on the course were the pattern cutting (to gain an understanding of garment construction) and CAD skills. We use computer packages, mostly Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop on a daily basis and getting to know them inside outside out is a real advantage. For me the combination of these design skills, an enthusiasm for the outdoors plus having worked in an outdoors shop and understanding how consumers make purchasing decisions were invaluable.
In my opinion anyone looking for a uni course to get into design for the outdoors currently should consider one of the 2 undergraduate courses available, the Sports Equipment Design - BSc (Hons) at Salford and the new BA (Hons) Performance Sportswear Design at Falmouth, of which I don’t know much about, but looks promising on paper. If you want a more scientific/ textiles approach then consider the BSc in Sports Studies (Outdoor Activities) course at Leeds.

If you’re looking for a postgraduate course then there are more options, though most of them being more textiles rather than garment oriented. There are postgraduate textiles courses with good reputations at Heriott Watt, Leeds and Manchester and I have recently been told there is a course at Otago University, New Zealand.“

Thoughts from Carol McDermott - Crux and Lightwave

2008-10-03T11:49:56+00:00

How to get into the industry?
As I see it, there are four different types of job that one could look at to get into the industry:
Design, Sales, Marketing and Product management

Design
This is a role that definitely requires qualification – I know of no designers who haven’t been to a design college of any description. The only exception to this is people who have started their own brands and may not have had any formal design background. The ones that I am aware of and appear to have some credibility are the Performance Design courses at Derby and Leeds. I have used several people from these for projects and the quality/calibre of the graduates is, in my experience, very good.

Sales
Whilst “sales” may not be considered in the same light as design or marketing, be warned – they have a big influence in many organisations on what gets developed or into the market. I have dealt with many, many sales people within the industry and they are, let us say, a…..variable bunch. This is a breed I really don’t understand, and how they get into this role is one that mystifies me. Just about everyone I dealt with in an organisation came from a sales role from another company, and it looks a bit like musical chairs (many sales people I know have worked for at least 5 brands in the outdoor industry). But how any of them actually got into sales in the first place, I don’t know.

Marketing
Again, just about everyone in this area I have worked with came with a professional background and formal qualifications etc, but there are exceptions. People in the marketing departments of outdoor brands have come from a wide range of previous employments – from sports brands to FMCG. As a discipline, marketing translates across any kind of industry very well – in theory, anyway. Strangely enough, I find the marketing people often have very little empathy with the industry they have chosen, and that includes outdoors.

Product management
This is a weird role – a combination of market and sales analysis leading across to product outlines, briefs and specifications. In some companies, PM’s are actually the designers – in a crude kind of way. The scope of this role certainly makes it one of the most interesting and satisfying, but it can be equally frustrating. However, I think this is also a role with probably the most diverse range of approaches to entering the industry, or at least, one that you could get away without any formal background. However, I do qualify this statement as being true for people of my generation in the industry (15-20 years) – it might not be so now as, at least with the big brands, everything is so much more professional.

How did I get into the industry?
I will relate my tale as I believe this is still a way in. My first job in the industry started as an assistant product manager at Berghaus (the “training school” for so many in the trade) – or was it? In many ways, my involvement started a few years earlier. My background is enviable. Born and bred in New Zealand, I was brought up in the outdoors and subjected to what was then a very good education system (I don’t know what it is like now). I studied and graduated in chemical & materials engineering at Auckland University. After 5 years professional life in NZ, I let my passion for mountaineering take over and discarded my career to become a “climbing bum” travelling around the world. It was during this period (of 6 years) that I started working in outdoor shops to finance the next expedition. This, in a way, could be considered my real start in the industry, but I do think it is typical of many attitudes that “retail staff don’t count”. However, I absolutely believe that two critical elements are here – I understood the end use (being a very active and regularly abusing, destroying but always using outdoor kit) and I understood what ordinary customers wanted (working in retail selling to them). My university degree wasn’t important, although the intellectual rigour that this requires (regardless of discipline) was helpful (if you don’t have it naturally) and I suspect was a background factor in getting my first job.

So, in summary
1. Be active (the level isn’t important – I was an average climber)
2. Use lots of kit and be critical of it in a rational way. Ignore brand-names and marketing hype. Challenge perceived wisdom.
3. Work in an outdoor shop and listen to customers
4. Cultivate contacts with sales reps or anyone else from the industry
5. Go to tradeshows and meet people, express interest etc.
6. Take a balanced approach – there is no perfect product and everybody is different in their experience and expectations.
7. Pursue a course of formal qualification relevant to your skills and ambition
8. Have passion, patience, perseverance and positivism, but especially passion

A final warning
Working for an outdoor brand may appear to be great, but one’s outdoor life can suddenly become seriously compromised as work takes over. Designers can become disillusioned with some brands as commercial realities often conflict with the ideals and flair that is their gift.

[ed] Carol McDermott is the inspirational force behind Crux and Lightwave.

http://www.crux.uk.com

http://www.lightwave.uk.com

Thoughts from Keith Hutcheon - Mountain Equipment

2008-10-24T10:30:32+00:00

How I got into the Industry
I personally think we are only here to produce a better version of ourselves and die. Luckily humans get bored easily and we have invented a whole manner of great activities such as mountaineering, climbing, hill walking, skiing, fell running, and mountain biking, to fill in time between sex and certain death.

I am the Designer for Mountain Equipment. This may seem odd, but I have never liked being called a designer. I probably have a severe personality disorder but I just don’t think it describes what I do very well. As I get older I find myself out for dinner with people I don’t know and everyone is telling each other about how wonderful it is to be married, having kids, and discussing how they want to eat happier chickens. They go through the basic list of questions they all ask each other in these situations and finally it comes, “so Keith, what do you do for a living?” Over the years I have honed the answer to simply, “I design Gore-Tex® jackets”. It is descriptive enough for non-outdoor people to understand and just enough for anyone with an interest in the outdoors to want to speak to me more.

Thankfully the job I have is a bit more varied than just designing jackets. We don’t have a design department, a sourcing department, a team of people to organise fabric testing, etc. All these jobs are, for the most part, my responsibility. I work closely with the Product Manager and a small team of Garment Technologists to design and develop a range of outdoor clothing and equipment every season.

Nature or Nurture
Biological determinism: where biological factors such as an organism’s individual genes (as opposed to social or environmental factors) completely determine how a system behaves or changes over time.

When I look back at how I got to where I am today I have to question was it a case of Nature or Nurture? My dad is a Design and Technology teacher with a passion for the outdoors and my mum is a dressmaker. I like to think it is partly genetic but I have memories of my dad designing fleece jackets and one-man backpacking tents when I was a kid. My mum would then make them up for him on a Saturday morning. I knew from a young age the only thing I wanted to do was design product for the outdoors.

I started out on a BSc in Industrial Design course based in Aberdeen. The course had an engineering and marketing element alongside design theory and practice. It recognised the need for more rounded designers…ones who could do more than just make a product look great. I kept my focus on the outdoors throughout the course and by the time I had finished 4th year I had designed some interesting products including a semi-inflatable kayak and carbon fibre shafted ice axes.

Work
A chance meeting with a windsurfing Automotive Design Manager at the New Designers Exhibition in London left me with a business card and ultimately with a job as a Design Engineer. It wasn’t long before I had become proficient on the CAD package, gained an understanding of injection moulding, tooling, and all things automotive. It wasn’t my planned choice of career but I was designing parts for the £300,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR, which kept me interested for a while. I found myself back on track when I was offered a job as a Project Designer working for a leading Cold Water Immersions Suit manufacturer. It was a chance to gain knowledge of technical textiles and human physiology, which was much more up my street. I spent my time researching new technologies to heat and cool the body. This meant afternoons in a swimming pool with the helicopter crash simulator, floating in a tank of cold water for up to three hours, or doing step ups in a climatic chamber all while wearing Gore-Tex suits and a rectal thermometer. Redundancies eventually hit the oil industry and I was out of a job.

Over the next couple of months I contacted quite a few outdoor brands and I applied to jobs that looked interesting. I got one interview in total and they ultimately did not want to take a chance on me…what did I have to do? Well, I had recently heard of a more direct way into the outdoor industry. The University of Derby had a one year full-time MA in Performance Sportswear Design course, which seemed to have a very high success rate in placing students with employers. This was a big investment for me financially. £15k to be exact by the time I had finished not including the loss of potential wages for the year. I went back into the automotive industry while I waited for the course to start and saved as much as I could.

Re-training
The course at Derby was split into three stages:

Stage 1 (Postgraduate Certificate): Postgraduate skills
- 4 Months long Identification of end-user requirements
Fibre and material studies
Garment technology

Stage 2 (Postgraduate Diploma): Practical design project development
- 5 Months long Project development, management, and launch
Portfolio development and presentation

Stage 3 (Master of Arts): Independent studies for performance sportswear design
- On placement if possible

Having already completed a design degree and with experience working as a designer, the majority of this stuff was pretty straightforward. However, I wasn’t on the course to pass, I was on the course to get a great job so I worked huge hours over the first nine months. The course was purely a means to an end for me. It wasn’t particularly well organised, but in-between all the problems there were some great lecturers who really knew their stuff. Fundamentally the course allowed me the time and space to develop my skill set from one product area to another. It will not suddenly make you a good designer.

Back to Work
I started the course in January and by October of the same year I had finished stage 2. Two weeks later I had my first interview and two weeks after than I had another four, one of which was Mountain Equipment. The interview lasted three hours most of which were spent chatting about which mountains I had been up, where I had been skiing or cycling, and how far could I run.

That was four years ago.

What i have learnt

1. There are plenty of jobs for good designers. You just have to spend time and effort accumulating the right skills, knowledge, and experience for employers to be interested. This will normally mean a design related degree (fashion, product, etc) combined with knowledge and experience of outdoor activities

2. I think there are two basic types of designers: Ones who design by inspiration and ones who design by perspiration. You are lucky if you are in the first camp. The majority have to work hard to generate enough ideas for a whole season

3. You won’t necessarily be designing product you would use or even like, so learn to listen to the people that will

4 In my opinion, designing the most commercial £60 waterproof jacket is much harder than designing the ‘best’ £300 waterproof jacket. You can learn something from product at every price point

5. Do not specialise too early if you don’t want to and don’t worry if your path is not going in a straight line. I am better at what I do because of the convoluted path I took

6. If you really want a job with an outdoor company just phone them up and ask to speak to the Design Manager. Posting a random CV will probably go nowhere.

See more information here

Thoughts from Mike Blenkarn arc’teryx

2008-09-30T07:25:42+00:00

Hi Nick

Yup, we need new and keen people for the future of and the advancement of high end outdoor pursuit’s equipment. In short it is very tough to fined successful and gifted talent that has the extensive assembly experience that was available from a domestic manufacturing base. The domestic manufacturing in the first world (the large market in which the stuff is intended) has collapsed over the recent 20 years (particularly in the past 5) making impossible to attain the necessary skill set to relate with the new sources of manufactured supply. Pictures sent over the pond and samples sent back the is the way most outfits conduct business, and I my experience, this has resulted in a homogenized generic trend observed in many resulting products. As a product designer with 30 ish years of suffering this business and interfacing with many parts involved in the process, this trend sucks. Maybe not for all, the hardcore marketing crowd seems relatively oblivious and as the old guard retire and die off, the world will be what it is/be. Many products suffer this syndrome and for any watching the progression of this it has been glacial show and impossible to see in short increments, thus the no issue acknowledgement. This expert assembly skill set is only one aspect of the process much in the same way that there a “key stone” species is only part of a food chain. There are many qualities/aspects that an outdoor equipment designer requires. Certainly, being familiar and a keen user of the activity for which one is designing is mandatory. Yvon Chouinard, Gordon Davidson(Berghaus), Todd Bibler, George Lowe, John Barrows, Ron Greg, Bill Forrest, Jack Stephson, Earl Miller, Eric Renolds, just to name a few, have or have had the end use for themselves first on their minds when working on their innovations. I have blithered enough- just a quick offering of my opinion. The future is always full of hope and surprises for those that are interested and keen.
Cheers
Mike Blenkarn

[ed] Arc’teryx has changed the way many companies approach design, and there attention to detail is second to non.

Check their website here

MA Performance Sportswear Design- No longer running

2009-02-14T12:01:06+00:00

The MA in Performance Sportswear Design at Derby University is no longer running. :(

Thoughts from Oliver Nissen - Equip, Rab, outdoordesigns and Pod

2008-10-24T10:34:06+00:00

From my 1 year’s experience in industry I’ve drafted a few basic
“truths” about design:

Design values enthusiasm and creativity, but needs an equal measure of
discipline and organisation too.

It is a field that needs those who can see the big picture while not
neglecting the fine detail.

Like genius 1% of a design is inspiration and 99% is perspiration.

To sum it up… open your eyes, be inspired, hold an opinion (but don’t
be opinionated), network widely, get proficient at CAD programs, have a
portfolio, and most of all persevere.

On a more industry specific note, I can say I got the best view of both
the bigger and smaller picture of the Outdoor Industry by visiting the
big trade shows - Winter ISPO and Outdoor Friedrichshafen. When you’re
there don’t waste time trying to talk with the marketing people - ask to
book 10mins to speak with the designers - generally we’re the nicest and
most approachable people at the shows

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Oliver Nissen

See more information here

Sports Equipment Design - BSc (Hons)

2008-10-02T08:52:33+00:00

Sports Equipment Design - BSc (Hons)

Salford Universirty run one of the few courses that has alot of direct relevance and course content for the outdoor recreation market.

Check out details here

[ed] I wish they had this course around when I choosing a course.

Thoughts from Clem Scarfe Beckett - Brasher

2008-10-02T08:06:45+00:00

[ed] So Clem how did you get started way back when.

I have always been designing - back since I was 6 (!) and have done various art/design courses at various colleges along the way. In 2003 I decided to “go into shoes” and studied “Footwear for Fashion Production” at Cordwainers, London. During our end of course show, I was contacted by HR at Pentland and was given the opportunity to take a place in the Design Pool - a unit set-up within Pentland HQ, that takes on graduates and helps them develop their skills through briefs/projects set by the brands within the Pentland umbrella. One of my first projects was actually for Brasher and after 6 months in the Design Pool, I was offered a design position within the Brasher team. My role started out in outdoor footwear, but more recently I have taken over the design of all Lifestyle/Travel product. I’ve been here now 4 and 1/2 years.
The outdoor industry can be challenging to work in, but alot of what makes it challenging is also what makes it interesting ... and enjoyable! You don’t just deal with the aesthetics, the styling, the colours - you are responsible for each product inside and out, to be functional, comfortable, fit for use, cost-efficient, on brand… plus all that goes with giving it the right shelf appeal! On top of all that you also have to take into account feedback from consumers, retailers, sales etc… Factories, product developers, bosses! etc etc… There’s alot of juggling - its not always always easy - there are hurdles… but rarely a dull moment! And where else can you disappear into the wilderness and it be part of your job!

Clem

[ed]
Brasher is one of the UKs leading footwear brands and their blog is pretty good.

http://blog.brasher.co.uk/blog/articles

More details on footwear courses here