Osprey

“A friend of mine took me over there who knew the industry and introduced me to sewing factories over there, and they made counter samples, and I was blown away by the quality of their workmanship, and the price was astounding. It was Pretty much the equivalent…”

“We figured out how to turn that into a fanny pack. You know, if you're in a, at a base camp, you could take the, you're Top lid off and go on a day hike with a fanny pack.”

“And we talked to, I think, maybe 35 different companies.”

“Retailers don't like that. I didn't really spend enough time understanding where they were coming from, and I would inflict them with new designs maybe every year, and that would obsolete their inventories.”

“I always relished it when I saw my competitors pick up outlying products. Tents, sleeping bags, et cetera, because it, to me, it meant they were going to lose focus and expertise on what they already were doing and kind of water themselves down.”

“Back in 2001, the company got the kind of free publicity that a brand can only dream of. When Time Magazine put Eric Weinmayer on the cover, Eric was the first blind person to climb Mount Everest. And there on the cover photo, he poses triumphantly on the side…”

“We moved production to a Korean, several, three different Korean manufacturers. It was either that or shut down, I think.”

“I never spent any money on advertising until perhaps 20 years later”

“In fact, at the most intense part of negotiation, our factories were shut down because of COVID.”

“We didn't even, we really didn't even borrow money unless it was to, for example do an addition on our factory down in Cortez.”

“The thing that happened when production moved to offshore with a lot of companies is that they also forfeited their design to those companies, to those manufacturers. I called it the Vietnam melting pot of design. It's this forfeiture of brands, unique designs…”

“For example, REI was approaching us every year to pick up our product, and we always had to say, no, we can't meet that demand, and they were baffled. They, you know, they were almost angry about that because they, there was a demand growing for Osprey within …”

“I think at the time, this is actually in 1986, we borrowed 35,000 dollars from a local community credit union, and then we had to find a location to start a larger scale production.”