#35 - King of Kickstarter

Peak Design are a brand that make some really fantastic products.

There's a lot of good things to say about the Peak Design Everyday Backpack.

I don't think I've ever been this excited to talk about a bag.

This is the Peak Design Travel Tripod.

It has a lot of unique elements that I've never seen on a tripod before.

Right, this is magic.

God, the internet is cool. You got the friends and family email that goes out, and that's the extent of the marketing that I did. I mean, that is the sum total, is I emailed my friends and family. You know, frankly, the whole entrepreneurial side, funding a business where you go out there and you raise money and you ramp up the stakes, did not even cross my mind. Like, ooh, should I raise money for this?

Right.

No, that's ridiculous. I'm gonna make the fucking thing. You know, last year I think we had an average of 38 employees, and we did somewhere between $65 and $70 million.

$5 million is not enough. $10 million. $15 million. $20 million.

$100 million. It's a half a billion.

He currently has $50 million. One or two people in a bedroom actually are threats to these like giant multi-billion dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose.

Add another zero to that price, buddy.

Add two more zeros.

$500 million.

Every week we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast. I started my own personal business school, and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that we find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details, like how did you get your first 100 customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the fan? I ask them, how'd you spend your money now that you're rich? And what would you do if you were starting over from scratch again today? If you're like me and you wanna own your own business instead of living a 9-to-5 job, this is the podcast for you. The Hustle presents My First Million. We're good to go. Cool. So Peter from Peak Design, how are you?

I'm doing just fine, man. It's a, it's a new year. We're ready to rock.

Ready to go. Okay, cool. I was telling you right before this, these are my favorite types of interviews where we just met. I don't know your full story. I know enough to know that it's interesting, but I don't know what are all the details. And so I'm gonna be discovering it for the first time because in some of these interviews I already know the, and I'm just trying to get the greatest hits out of the artist. I'm trying to get I want you to play your, your best stories that I already know. In this case, I don't know exactly what they are. We'll be figuring it out together.

Fair enough. I like to play that Greatest Hits album myself. No problem.

And so the reason I think this is interesting is because you make a product that is very relatable, that I want, that a lot of people want. I think your background was kind of interesting where you weren't just one of those people who said, I want to start a business just for starting a business's sake necessarily. It sounded like you've had phenomenal success on Kickstarter. So give people a sense of two things. What does the company do? Sure. And then the second thing is give us a sense of scale. I like to talk about, you know, what you guys have achieved, because really we're going to work backwards and say, great, how'd you start? But if people don't know what you've achieved, they'll tune out within 5 minutes because they're like, I don't know why I should care. Why should they care?

Who would be first?

Pebble. Pebble was first. 3 campaigns, $12 million, $12 million, and $20 million on their campaign. Smartwatches, who knew? Yeah, who knew? I guess Apple and Samsung also knew. In any case, I think with our 2020 Kickstarter, which should be no surprise to people, we're going to be doing another Kickstarter in 2020. I'm very optimistic that we're going to take that spot. I think our next product is going to be certainly the most widely adopted. I think one of the coolest, and no, I can't share with you what it is.

That's all right. It's going to be a lot of fun. Tell people, what does the company do? What do you guys make?

So going back to 2010, that's when I quit my job. I was a construction engineer, and for about 2 years I had this idea kind of tinkering around in my head. After I did like a 4-month walkabout when I was 25, I went on a leave of absence from work. I went to India and Southeast Asia and Australia, New Zealand. I had a camera with me the whole time. It was great because I was, you know, I fancied myself a photographer and a writer and having that little semi-spiritual journey as a young buck. What is a walkabout?

How does that actually work? You take some time, you travel, and you do what?

Well, I think quite specifically you don't make a plan. You just go figure it out. So I bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong and arrived at 6 AM and had literally no idea what to do. It was kind of weird because I'd never asked it. And the funny thing is it dawned on me for the first time as I got off the train, I was like, holy shit, I don't know what to do. Because it was also 6 AM and there was no— like, you can't check into a hostel or something anything like that.

So anyway— And you decided to do that because what?

My buddy Dave was 3 years older than me. Coincidentally, he's my CFO now. And he had taken 5 leaves of absence from Ernst Young where he was working. And it was just a cool thing that he did. He just go explore the world. Right. And say, "It doesn't— If you don't hire me back, that's fine. But I'll come back if you got a job for me." And it just worked for him. And so that was kind of the confidence and the inspiration for traveling. Once you experience that— I studied abroad in college and went to Europe for my first time, first time out of the country. Country, and it was clear that travel is just— it's so full of novelty, you know? One of the coolest things in this world is doing something for the first time, right? And travel is the opportunity to do that nonstop, right?

I love it. Yeah, I studied abroad, and it wasn't really a tough decision on my part, but I was trying to convince friends to do it, and they were all coming up with reasons not to. And I just told them, I said, look, look at the year ahead of us. The people who studied abroad won't shut up about it, and none of them regret it. So like, what are the odds it's really gonna be like a bad thing? We're probably gonna end up just like them, not shutting up about it, not regretting it. That's exactly what happened.

That is exactly what happened. It's, uh, it's— you're batting 1,000 across that, right? Every time.

Every time. So you're on the walkabout.

Yeah. And I had a camera with me the whole time, and it was a real pain in the ass to carry with me because it's on a strap and it's banging against your chest, and you look like a tourist. You are a tourist, but you know, you're wearing the badge. That's right, you're wearing the badge. But it's essential if you're a photographer, you have to have it with you. So I just came up with this idea, which actually doesn't necessarily make you look like too much less of a tool, but it is incredibly useful. It's this clip that clamps onto a backpack strap, and then your camera is immediately accessible, totally hands-free, locked into your camera strap. When you need it, push the button, pull it out. Right. And to this day, you know, I think Peak Design makes 120 different SKUs at least. We still sell hundreds of thousands of Capture Camera Clips every year, and yet almost 10 years running now, it's just a fantastic product.

And people used to put —this just around their neck, right? You just hang your camera around your neck, this sort of heavy DSLR camera around your neck.

Well, and I'd say certainly that's still the most common way people do it. Of course, at the time I was, you know, when I was 26, I was like, no one is ever going to use a neck strap again. We have revolutionized the world. And in retrospect, a little bit more humbly, it's like, well, the thing is, it's actually kind of a niche case. In that niche case, it's an excellent product, but it's not the be-all end-all. And that realization came soon enough. And actually, that led us to our second product, which was a camera strap. But guess what? This one solved the problem of, you know, what's a real pain in the ass? Removing camera straps and putting them back on. It's a ridiculously complex friction mechanism that is hard to figure out on your own. So we totally solved that problem. And camera straps, again, to this day, are our very best-selling product. We sell millions of camera straps every year. And so now we've got clips and now we've got straps and we're chugging along about 4 years into this business. And a very well-known photographer named Trey Ratcliff called us up and said, "Hey, you guys are solving all the problems in photography and you're doing it in cool ways. I want to make a camera bag with you guys." Okay. And so given that this guy was going to throw his considerable reach behind it, we endeavored to design a camera bag. And that was, you know, we were not bag designers, but we took the exact same fresh approach to making a camera bag that we did everything else. And we said, well, what are the actual problems? And that's what Peak Design, I think, has been really, really good at over the years is truly discerning what the actual problems are, not paying attention to the gimmicks, and then just executing beautifully and elegantly on those problems. Right. And being very clear about that in our marketing. Here's the problem. This is why we did it. I think it looks nice. What do you think?

Wow. I like the way you said that. And I like the principle, but I like the way you said it more because I found that when I do these interviews, there's like 2 things that will just stick with me from each one. And I know that's one of them. And it's not going to sound— Oh, I'm getting warmed up, man. It's not going to sound profound, but to me it sinks in because the best principles tend to be the simplest ones, if you can actually drill them into your head and stick to it and not get distracted. It sounds like that's what you guys did. So you go from construction engineer, which I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm imagining yellow hat on you. I don't know if that's true. That's about right. You got a job. The first thing you made was this, the clip. How do you go about making a product? Where do you— You don't know how to do that.

That's true. I did not know how to do that. I look back on that period of my life and I think I would know what to do now much better than I did then, but whatever I did, it worked. And what it was, was I first made crude prototypes. I mean, really ugly things out of plastic and wood to prove the very basic concept. And I was like, yep, you can hang a camera from your backpack. Great. And then I used a tool that I'd gotten pretty good at from construction called SketchUp. SketchUp is a 3D CAD modeling software, but it pretty much only handles right angles. I've used SketchUp.

It's like the kind of beginner-y thing, right?

Is it like— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's kind of like, it's not like AutoCAD, it's like—

It's not SolidWorks. Is it free?

Is that why I used it?

It is free. Okay. You can pay for it now, and it certainly has broader applications, especially for architects and things like that. But I took that simple product and, and made it do curves and made it do angles. And certainly a great tool for kind of my conceptual 3-dimensional design of what this thing might look like. Right. And so even though it's not a mechanical engineer's program of choice by any stretch, I maxed it out and was able to crank out 3D printed prototypes and just kind of further refine the concept. Concept. And on a hiking trail one time, I met this 60-year-old dude, old-school hippie, who's got a little compound outside of Auburn. And I told him about my camera clip, and he told me that he was a machinist and that he would make the prototype for me if I came and visited him. Okay. So I went up to Auburn and stayed in his guest trailer.

And at this point, are you thinking this is a company, or you're just like, I'm making this clip for fun? What's your mindset at that time?

Okay, so I don't think I was thinking that it was a company. I was fixated on the product itself, but I had every belief that this product was going to pay the bills. I just thought it was so damn useful that it was gonna pay the bills. And I'm living on my savings. I quit my job with about $25,000 in savings.

And you quit to do this. To do this. You told your boss, you told your family and your friends, you're like, I'm gonna make this camera clip. Yeah.

And what'd they say? Gosh, it's funny. I certainly don't remember encountering like, geez, man, you're crazy. I recall encouragement, I suppose, but it was very much a solo journey. I think that people will cite bravery or something like that. I kind of push back on that. The fact is I was a, you know, 25-year-old dude with an engineering degree. Right. And $25 grand in my pocket. Like, the worst that was going to happen is I don't have $25 grand in my pocket and I go be an engineer again. Right. You know? Yeah, it didn't— I wasn't super out there on some cliff. You were realistic about your risk. I was realistic about my risk. And I also wasn't in the, you know, frankly, the whole entrepreneurial side of funding a business where you go out there and you raise money and you ramp up the stakes. Right away, or you— I mean, you're not gonna get debt financing when you don't— when you don't have anything to show, so that's not even an option. But it didn't even occur to me. I was like, I'm going to make this thing and then I am going to sell it, right?

That'll be the money part.

And then even y'all's Kickstarter, right? You've done $30 million in Kickstarter, and people say crowdfunding—

to me, this is like you're pre— you're selling your product.

You're just selling it before. You're saying, hey, here's what I'm gonna do. If you're interested, buy it now. I'll use that money to make it. It's not donations or equity in your company, right?

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Like 3 people within the course of 1 week in January 2011, because I, I had no business Plan, right? Mind you, I was gonna make this thing and I was confident that I could get people to buy it, but as far as selling it, I was like, I don't know, I'll figure that out later. You know, had Kickstarter not come around, this whole thing would probably be a slightly different story, right? In that I wouldn't be here, but I'd be talking to a construction engineer. Yeah, that's right. Who has his own very cool clip. Actually, you probably wouldn't be talking to a construction engineer. I'd be on a site somewhere wishing that the end of the day would come.

So 3 people recommend, hey, you should get a Kickstarter. You don't even know what this is at the time.

But I, you know, I check it out obviously, and it's like, oh, no-brainer. This is what I'm going to do. And then it's like, it looks like I have to make a video. And so I made my first and made and edited my first video. Right. And the funny thing is, is it became the second most funded project of all time ever on Kickstarter at the time. And I got to say, man, I'm sure this sounds cocky. I'm sure it sounds arrogant, but I wasn't the least bit surprised. Right. I thought it was such a good idea, and I looked at the other projects that it had made that had done better, and I was like, man, Capture is way more useful than that stuff. Right. So I think this thing is gonna kill it. Right.

And it did.

It totally did. And it was a dream come true, man. Like, there is nothing as sweet as that first Kickstarter when the, you know, the money comes rolling in and people are saying, I like that idea. It's just such affirmation of everything you've been working on. Right.

And it's a really Do you remember like that morning when you, you know, you're waking up or you're seeing the orders come in? What was that? What were you doing that day? What was it like?

And so it just got picked up by bloggers, or what was the spread like?

Totally. The first blog was Petapixel, and the second blog was Gizmodo, and it really rocked after that.

Did you do anything, you know, either intentionally or unintentionally to help that spread? Did you have like really good assets or, you know, like— Nope. Nothing? Nope. Your Kickstarter video was good? Like now that you look back on it, are you like, "That was a good one," or are you cringing when you look back?

Just hysterical. Oh, it's actually beyond cringe. It's into just laugh country, you know? The cringeworthy ones are like years 2 or maybe like 3 and 4, where you're like, oh, we're good at this now, right? And you put something up there and it's like, it's like, oh, this is emotional, this gets at the heart, right? We are Apple carriage. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Those are the ones where you're cringing because you're like, you know, you're like, oh God, you're so amateur, right? And now we've settled into something where I feel confident that we do know what we're doing and that, and the products and also the marketing products and the collateral we put out are truly dialed on, on kind of a global global platform.

Right. That first Kickstarter does how much? $5, $6 million, something like that?

Let's do it. Right, we just say no more.

Yeah, exactly. And we've legitimately grown our distribution that way, you know, from all these people who started super small, and now they are writing Peak Design into the— like, Peak Design has become the anchor tenant of their distribution companies. That's the case in Hong Kong, which manages a ton of different Asian countries. That's the case in France. It was the case in the UK. So it feels really good. The Czech Czech Republic distributor. So these are not retailers, these are distributors.

These are distributors, yeah. And so explain how this works. So who is this person? They buy from you, then they sell to—

To their country, and in some cases they're selling to a network of retailers, right? It's the middleman. We can't translate into Czech. We have no capacity to understand the Czech market. They do. They're boots on the ground there. So we sell them a $100 product. We'd like to sell it to them for $40. So keep that in mind. These are the kind of details and information that people, I think, it's important to know.

They would like to have what's called 60 points of margin to work with there and go turn that— and they'll probably sell it, you know, they'll take $20 from that $100 product and the retailer will get $40. There's a lot of money, a lot of the value of a product goes into the price of that resale, which is of course why direct-to-consumer is the jam.

And so for you guys, which one— are you guys 50/50?

Is direct-to-consumer a bigger part of your business? By volume, wholesale is larger, by volume of sales that is. If you were to include Amazon, the websites, and Kickstarter, and eBay for our secondary market, just a little bit larger in terms of revenue. Gotcha.

Yeah. And so for you guys, you start adding these channels, I'm sure, sort of organically, right? People reach out, oh, this is a good idea. We should do more of that. Why aren't we on Amazon? We should get on Amazon, that sort of thing.

The balance there, right, is if you're going to be highly adaptive and responding and reacting to what's coming your way, you still need to do some proactive things to like create opportunities, to get things to just kick up the dust and let some new things come to you. So like the Kickstarter created a whole bunch of opportunities and then you reacted well to those. And so how do you— I guess what are the things that you proactively do to just sort of create some action, kick the dust up a little bit?

What do you think of the weaknesses of doing that, going that route? Because you guys chose not to go that route or it never appealed to you.

The weaknesses of what we're doing or what Away does?

Yeah, to be conscious of, right? Let's say there's some strengths with it, but what are the weaknesses?

Right. What do you guys— I read a stat. It's a couple of years old now, but I read a stat that was 2016. It said you guys had, I think, 18 employees at the time. I don't know. How many do you guys have now? Call it 42. 42. And it said, "Hey, these guys are doing, you know, something like $23 million in revenue on 18 employees." So basically a million dollars ahead in revenue or a little bit more than that. And I thought that was pretty remarkable and I love that stat. I always pay attention to the sort of the per capita earnings of a company. And is that something you think about or did you sort of architect the business in a way to be sort of small footprint on the number of people it takes or dollars it takes to build? Do you think about the sort of the revenue per head?

And the business has been— you haven't raised money since then, right? We talked about the Kickstarter, so you guys have been bootstrapped the whole way.

So not even for the— to make products that people love, you're saying?

Yeah, I joke about this a lot, which is companies by law, essentially, depending on what type of company you are, you're incorporated as your job is to maximize shareholder value. It's the actual requirement of your— if we're talking about mission, that's the required mission for most companies. They state that their mission is to make the customers happy. They probably honestly are trying to do what you're doing. Yeah. And then they'll sort of the final, you know, lie or hand-waviness that happens is, is then talking about making the world a better place. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You know, just tack that on at the end. And it's funny you say exactly what you're saying. At our company, I told the team exactly this. I said, we're trying to build the company that we want to work at. Uh-huh. That's the whole thing. That's the whole point. And in order to do that, we're going to need to— what's the type of company we want to be at? We want to make awesome products that we find interesting and innovative and scratch our creative itch. Uh-huh. We want to get them to millions of people because that's fun. Uh-huh. And hearing their feedback, it matters to us. And we need to make money so that this whole operation can exist and we can have an awesome workplace with awesome people and hire the best talent. And that's what this is about. And it was a very foreign thing that I was telling them that seemed like the only logical thing to me at the time.

Mm-hmm. I certainly agree. And I'm really proud of us for articulating it and for the rest of the team ultimately being okay with, you know, us getting very public about that. Right. I will tack on that last part which you mentioned, which I think frequently is hand-waving, Well, first off, we became a public benefit corporation, so— Yeah, explain what that is.

People have probably heard that, but they don't maybe understand.

So basically, instead of being— we're a C-Corp, and instead of being beholden to maximize shareholder value at the risk of being sued by the shareholders, which in the case of Peak Design isn't a very big risk because I'm the only owner, but still, from a kind of a—

Structural perspective.

A structural perspective, or a spiritual standpoint even. We wanted to make sure that the point of Peak Design has nothing to do with shareholder value and has everything to do with upholding our mission. Our mission and our purpose. We kind of delineate the two. The purpose for us to be happy. The mission is 6 different points including build the best thing, succeed at the expense of nobody, offset our environmental impact, use our voice to inspire positive change, put happiness over growth. But the part about offsetting our environmental impact and then using our voice to inspire positive change is really what drove the thing I've been working probably the most on, which is a new organization called Climate neutral. Right.

And so just to explain the mechanics first, so you said you're a C-Corp, but you're a public benefit company, which, which means what? What is— what do you do if you're an entrepreneur who wants to do this? How do you do that?

When you file with the Secretary of State, you have to make an election to be a PBC, public benefit corporation. You can still be an S-Corp or C-Corp. I don't know if LLC— I would imagine LLC works as well within that, but then it's just, you know, about your operating agreement and things like that.

—um, and that allows you to not adhere to the maximize shareholder value as the core, let's say, tenet or requirement. That's right. And instead you replace that with your—

you could replace it with, uh, you know, I don't know if it's actually whatever you want. To my knowledge it is, but I think it would stand to reason that it has to be some specific public benefit. You exist for the broader shareholders, which includes the public that we all live amongst.

Gotcha. Great. And so you have your company, that's Peak Design, and now have a new entity, is that right?

It's a new entity. It's a, it's a non— it's a 501. It's a nonprofit. I'm the founder along with a guy named Jonathan Cedar who heads a company called BioLite. The CEO of Climate Neutral, his name is Austin Whitman, and there's about 5 people working for the org right now.

And so what are you trying to do with Climate Neutral?

Climate Neutral is an organization that owns a label called Certified Climate Neutral. And when you see Certified Climate Neutral on a product, it means that the brand displaying has measured their entire carbon footprint all the way down to raw materials, reduced what they reasonably can, and then critically offset the rest. And it is all about the— the fact that the conversation about climate change is what it is, and businesses sit there and continue to wring their hands and say, oh, we, we hope that by 2050 we will have reduced our footprint, or like, we're going to straight-line our reductions between now and 2050 without actually taking any concrete action, is absolutely abhorrent to me, especially when I understood finally what Peak Design's carbon footprint was and then how much it cost to eradicate.

And how, how'd you do that? How'd you figure out what your—

I hired a consultancy for $40,000, which was a lot of money, and I wasn't too happy about having to pay that. That led to part of Climate Neutral, which is the fact that we'll measure your footprint for free with a tool that we're developing along with some of the world's best carbon LCA experts. So we've handled that that part of it, right? And then the other thing is that— what'd you learn?

So they— you pay $40 grand, they did an analysis, and what'd they give you back?

What were you surprised to learn? Well, at the $10,000 mark, they had done what's called a— they used a tool called the Scope 3 evaluator, and they ask you, how many dollars did you spend on metals, how much on plastics, how much on air shipping, how much on sea shipping, etc.? And they said, okay, your footprint is about 16,700 tons, plus or minus 20%. And this was at the $10,000 mark in the contract. And I was I was like, "Okay, well, what do we do now?" He's like, "Well, now we're gonna do the deep dive analysis. We're gonna knock on the doors of your entire supply chain and get their energy bills and find out their proportionate amount." It's just like, "Oh, wow, that's gonna take up the rest of the year." And that's gonna cost an additional 30 grand. I see why it is. Like, that's an insane amount of work. I was like, "Can we just round up that 20% and call it good?" And they're like, "Well, what do you mean?" Call it good. Well, we want to offset it all.

And did you think, okay, $16,000 plus minus 20%, is that horrible? Like, I wouldn't even know how to— I had no idea. I don't know how to interpret that.

But you started to come up with a solution. Yeah, yeah.

What am I doing? I pay the money, what happens?

You pay the money, and of course, what I've just described there is a hypothetical scenario. I'm sure that there are people who heard that and go, "Nuh-uh." Yeah.

There aren't enough carbon offsets in the world. Don't email us if you're going to do that.

Right. There aren't enough carbon offsets in the world, and that is accurate. There aren't right now, but if you show a market-based solution that demonstrates demand for carbon offsets, and there's a revenue stream formed so that a for-profit carbon-reducing business can exist, you better goddamn believe that those carbon offsets are gonna get produced, right? And so what it is, you can take any technology which sequesters carbon or prevents carbon from getting there in the first place. So Peak Design bought a whole bunch of landfill gas offsets. What is that? Well, there's a landfill in South Carolina that is filled up. There's no municipal law which says, okay, landfill, you have to now cap that landfill and trap those gases gases and flare it, because landfills will sit there and they'll leach methane until they're done decomposing for a long time. And so basically, Peak Design said, well, if that's not going to happen, we'll make that happen. We will pay for an HDPE tarp and a bunch of dirt to get pushed onto that, and you collect the methane and turn that into electricity. So that's what a carbon offset is. We have nothing to do with that landfill in South Carolina. However, there was a greenhouse gas producing opportunity for us, and we snapped it up. Love it. And you had to find that yourself? No, no, there's— I mean, there are, there are actually, frankly, so many organizations involved in the, in the retailing of carbon offsets, and I think that's great. It has a— it has the foundations of, uh, the type of market solution that we desperately need, right? We just need a hell of a lot more demand, right?

So your, your plan is get the demand up. That's right. And then either you make the marketplace or someone will make the marketplace with the demand and the supply. It's already there.

It's not like we need to recreate something, we just need more of it. Right. Yeah. And the other, I think it's important to note other types of offsets that exist out there. You can buy farmland that is fallow and plant a forest there. And so long as you've got the survivability of that forest, that is a carbon store, right? Like an unquestionable, trees are made out of carbon. You're sucking it out of the air and you're putting it there and then you have to protect that forest and that is a carbon offset. You can pay a farmer to switch from traditional row agriculture to no-till agriculture. Cost the farmer a little bit more, you pay him that difference, and then the root structure within those fields ends up drawing down a ton of carbon. Peak Design planted a bunch of seagrass in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria came through. Like, there are, there are all sorts of opportunities, and it's a big world out there, right? There's plenty. This earth can absorb the carbon, it just costs money, right?

And it seems like it feels good to know also where that money's going. Like, the fact that you guys did the seagrass, sure, after to the hurricane or whatever. That's much better than saying, "We bought a bunch of credits, so we're good now." Right. Right. It feels very different.

It does feel very different. And that information, I think, is always achievable, and you should always know what you're buying and what you're going to support. But I am excited for the day when Peak Design and the 80 companies that we've gotten to sign up along with us right now, including your neighbors Allbirds right over there, I am excited for the day when we are not the exception, we are the norm. Right. And I'm excited for the day when a consumer picks up a bottle, looks for the climate neutral label and doesn't see it and says, puts it down, well, I'm not going to buy this, right? These assholes don't pay for their carbon, right? So that's the dream scenario. And, you know, it's, it's so vastly different than Peak Design, and I don't know, it's, it's far, far less predictable for me. I don't know if it's going to take off, but man, we've gotten some serious traction so far, and people seem to be resonating with the idea.

Yeah, I'm excited when you tell me about it, that I'm not the most environmentally conscious person by nature. It's not like I'm already up that alley or sort of knee-deep and knowing about this stuff, but when you tell me that, that just makes sense to me. It appeals to my senses as a businessperson. It appeals to my senses as a human being, and I'm pretty bullish on that. I'm not just saying that to blow smoke. I was going to ask you about Peak Design. You guys do the innovation on the product. What happens if people just knock you off and just start copying your designs and your innovations? Because I would imagine that that's a problem, right?

Yeah. We just launched a tripod on Kickstarter this last year, and it is awesome. It is like— the tripod industry has not been shaken up in decades and we just blew it wide open.

What's it called? How do I—

It's called the Travel Tripod by Peak Design. And basically what we did is instead of having cylindrical legs that are incapable of collapsing onto themselves, we made legs that were shaped more like a pie wedge. And so they fit around this triangular center column, so everything nests really beautifully. The idea for this came also in 2008 on that walkabout. I was in India, I was in Darjeeling, India, sitting there with my tripod and I drew this sketch of these pie wedges that would collapse around, at that time in my sketch it was a cylindrical center column still. I don't, nobody made that, you know, we sat on that idea for a long time and took 4 years to produce it and in part the reason is because it's really hard to make. There's, you know, 172 moving interfaces with that 3 360 individual parts. It's complex.

So how are you guys making these? You're designing them in-house? You have a partner?

Uh, our manufacturing partner in China is— I mean, the, the prototyping and development of these things is, is a collaboration between our, our manufacturer and our 3D printing and our, our tools in our own shop here.

And how often, I guess early on or maybe now, but how often were you going to China to visit partner? Because I've been on the other side of Alibaba, and it's tough to get a product made. You have to get a sense of, are they understanding the vision here? How do I communicate this effectively? How did you do that?

Spent a lot of time over there. Not me personally, as much as my engineering team on this one. I've just— my role has become more bona fide CEO than design engineer. Yeah, but they spent a lot of time over there. There's a lot of calls, almost, you know, it's sometimes it's every night calls with China to communicate the day's needs and things like that. But most importantly, we have a very trusting relationship with our manufacturer. They were as tiny as us when they started, and we have just grown in lockstep with one another. And that's been the case with our Vietnamese supply chain and with our Chinese supply chain. So we're not going in there to some big-ass company that doesn't really care about your business that much. Now, this has been like a true partnership from, from the ground up. And like I say, we were very small. So anyone who's listening who is like, well, I don't have that right now, it's true. You probably don't have that out the start, but neither did you. Neither did we. And we built a foundation of trust and respect and genuine care for each other's needs.

And so let's rewind. So early on, before you have that partner, talk about how you found them and how long that took and any of the pitfalls, the traps you messed up on.

With our current setup, there was actually a guy who called us up in 2013. His name is Pat Sung. He lives in Portland. Portland, and he's become a dear friend. And actually, he serves as kind of a liaison between— he sort of finds the factories and owns that, that partnership. And he's been, he's been wonderful in going out there and helping us source these things. His name, his company's name is Alliance Trading Group, and they're wonderful to work with. And, you know, as they've grown, I think that they're— it's just been cool. It's another partner that's grown up alongside of us. But even if it weren't for that, we had started with Wuxi Great Machining to do our— which we found on MF .com, and Shengda, I remember they were in Ningbo, China, and that was Alibaba. Right. You know?

And so if you're somebody today who's looking to, you know, find a manufacturing partner, what would you tell them, kind of bullet points or any mistakes you made that now in retrospect you realize you would have done differently or a learning you had?

Did you go to the Canton Fair?

No, I didn't actually go to the Canton Fair, and I never have been. A couple of my employees just went event. But no, literally exchanging emails with people and, and eventually saying like, okay, we're gonna come go see our tooling, will you pick us up at the airport? And sure, Mr.

Peter, let's do it. Nice. Okay, great. And so if you're— we should wrap up. So if you're listening to this and you're like, Peter sounds great, Peak Design sounds great, climate neutral sounds great, where do they go to get more of either your thoughts, find out about the products? Shout out some places where people can connect with you beyond the podcast and get it— get a hold Sure.

The Peak Design website is great. I'd recommend peeking into the journal. That's kind of where I do write a lot of my sort of bigger thought pieces if you're interested in my philosophies, which you might not be.

If you've reached the end of the podcast, you probably are, honestly.

That's right. That's right. You know, hilariously, I have like 9 Twitter followers, I think. I've just never ramped that up. I think I've got an Instagram account that I get too bashful about. I actually ridiculously. I think that very few people are having a New Year's resolution that says, "I really want to bone up my social media presence," but there is a part of me that's like, "You know what? I do kind of want to do that," because I do love taking photographs or taking pictures and creating videos, and I don't share them with the world, and I'm conflicted about whether I actually want to do that or not. Sorry, that was a long response. Just go to Peak Design. Go to climateneutral.org. Hopefully Google will take you there.

Nice. All right, Peter. Thanks for coming on, man. I really appreciate that, and I dig the story. I was interested in the products and the product design part, but the climate neutral part for me kind of stole the show here.

So right on, man. Happy to hear that, John. Great. Thanks.

I need a dollar, dollar, dollar, that's what I need.

Well, I need a dollar, dollar, dollar, that's what I need. Said I need a dollar, dollar, dollar, that's what I need. And if I share with you my story, would you share your dollar with me?