Workingman’s Dead rolled on the cassette player, the Grateful Dead cranking out an energetic version of “Uncle John’s Band.” Always one of my favorites, I turned up the volume.
“Well, the first days are the
hardest days, don’t you worry anymore…”
I listened attentively to the close
harmony as I sat on the short steps that led up from the sewing floor to the
small offices at the back of our little shop. Once a mom-and-pop grocery store,
the small wood-framed building at the base of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill was now
our factory.
I wasn’t idle. My hands were fully
engaged in assembling pole sets for Omnipotents, gluing aluminum ferrules onto
spiral-wrapped fiberglass pole sections with a crack-filling epoxy. The
west-facing windows captured and magnified the late afternoon heat on that
cloudless sunny day. Even though I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, probably a
Grateful Dead or Ski Hut t-shirt, I perspired freely and fought my torpor. It
felt too hot to work.
A visitor interrupted the
ordinariness of the afternoon. A man in a rumpled brown suit approached our
front door, looked in tentatively, and walked in. His tie askew, he looked a
bit weary and apprehensive, carrying his boxy brown briefcase in the heat of the
day. I wondered, who is this guy?
He certainly didn’t resemble our
regular customers. They varied from disheveled climbing bums who needed good
gear to well-heeled outdoor couples wearing their barely used mountain parkas.
We didn’t get any suits. Probably lost and looking for directions, I thought.
The man who looked as if he might be
lost introduced himself.
“Hello, I’m Joe Tanner. I’m from W.L. Gore.”
Joe was an engineer from a
technology company based in Wilmington, Delaware. After a three-week trip to
introduce a new fabric to the outdoor companies of the Rockies and the West, he
finally arrived at Early Winters, a whistle-stop if there ever was one. How had
he heard about us?
While waiting for his Denver
appointment in a sparse reception area, Joe picked up a copy of Mountain
Gazette. Paging through the niche publication, he noticed a small black-and-white space ad. Great Pacific Ironworks. He did not know of them, but they
seemed a likely candidate for his fabric, so he added them to his list of
companies to visit.
Joe drove his rental car north to
Ventura. The Pacific Coast Highway was a two-lane driver’s road that curved
back and forth, up and down as it snaked along the coast with the vast expanse
of the Pacific Ocean below. As he approached Ventura, he wondered if this small
town held any promise for his quest to find the companies that would embrace
his new product. He pulled into the parking lot at Great Pacific, looking
forward to meeting Tom Frost.
As
an experienced engineer, Joe quickly assessed the structural principles,
determining it was
no ordinary mountaineering tent. Intrigued, he asked Tom to tell
him about it. Tom gave Joe the highlights and finished by suggesting,
“These are some guys that you should talk to. They might be
interested in your fabric.”
He gave Joe our company name and address.
After visiting every potential
client that he could find in California, Joe headed for the Pacific Northwest.
He stopped in Portland to call on Hirsch Weiss, who made the White Stag
products, and then with Tim Boyle at Columbia Sportswear. Flying towards
Seattle, Joe looked from the window at the stunning massif of Mt. Rainier, glaciers
gleaming in the sun. It spoke to him that he had come to the right place, a
vast, rugged wilderness where intrepid adventurers would welcome his new
product. He felt this was a good omen that portended success.
Seattle began at Eddie Bauer, REI,
and Sportcaster, all with significant research and manufacturing facilities,
capable of quickly developing and bringing new products to market. Would one of
them be the first to incorporate the new Gore-Tex fabric into a commercial
product? As with the outdoor industry folks that he visited in California and
Oregon, they all accepted Joe’s offer to send sample yardage.
But something important was missing.
Where was the wild enthusiasm that Joe thought he might hear? Yes, everyone was
very cordial, but no one seemed truly excited. He decided to visit the tiny
company that Tom Frost had pointed him towards, Early Winters.
As Joe drove to the Queen Anne area
of Seattle, he wondered what he’d find. He noticed the Seattle Center and the
Space Needle, the landmark tower built for the 1962 World’s Fair. Lower Queen
Anne wasn’t an industrial area where one could expect to find a manufacturing
facility. He drove slowly as he scouted for Early Winters, searching for the
corner of Queen Anne and West Thomas; he saw only apartments and small shops.
Was he lost?
And then it appeared, a small
one-story, flat-roofed, wood-frame building on the corner at 300 Queen Anne
North. The façade had a windowed double door flanked by two front picture
windows, and on the fascia above were large hand-painted plywood letters. They
spelled out Early Winters, Ltd. At first glance, it was not very impressive, but
Joe, someone who always followed through, parked his car and prepared to meet
the folks at Early Winters.
When he opened the front door and
looked in, he saw three sewing machines, a fabric cutting table, and only a few
workers. Everyone was wearing shorts and T-shirts. They all looked like
hippies. Hippie music filled the small factory floor.
A scruffy young man approached him.
He looked friendly, but Joe thought to himself,
“This is probably not going to be my
best sales call.”
He did not expect much from this
last Seattle sales pitch. It looked for all the world like a real long shot, a
complete waste of time. Hot and tired, he sighed and entered.
The Omnipotent, the world’s best two-person mountaineering tent, was our only Early Winters product. Made in small production runs, we sold them directly to customers in our shop, at outdoor shows, and through mail order. Our limited wholesale program hadn’t taken off, and we now realized that it would never take off. Consequently, our sales were limited.
Not enough people knew about the
Omnipotent or needed the world’s best mountaineering tent. Even if they wanted
it, few felt they could afford it. We desperately needed a second act, another
more mainstream product. Tents were our expertise, so we set out to create a
lighter-weight, more affordable two-person backpacking tent. There were more
casual backpackers than dedicated mountaineers, and weight was always an issue
for backpackers.
Inspired by Jack Stephenson’s
Warmlite tent, an ultralight two-person tent with a hoop design and tapered body,
I developed a two-person backpacking tent. Constructed with the same materials
that we used in our Omnipotent, it was smaller and lighter. A single-wall tent,
made from coated nylon ripstop and two fiberglass pole sets, it tapered sharply
from front to back to reduce weight. Two differential vents would create
airflow from back to front to eliminate or minimize interior condensation.
We pinned our hopes on this new
design and christened it the Potent. We liked the name. After some brief
prototype testing, we made a short production run of three and quickly sold
them all. Within a couple of weeks, all three were back in our shop, having
been returned by angry customers who complained of excessive condensation. The
Potent was a total bust. Impotent. We reluctantly shelved the patterns and put
that concept on the back burner, despondent with its failure.
Nicolai, Z-man, and I now huddled
around Joe in Nicolai’s small back office, anticipating something which might
be special. Without any flourish, Joe slowly opened his bulky briefcase and
pulled out a large black-and-white photograph and a flimsy 6” square swatch of
thin white plastic-like material, a membrane. Polytetrafluoroethylene, Joe
explained, was a synthetic fluoropolymer of tetrafluoroethylene. PTFE is an inert
material more commonly known by its DuPont trade name as Teflon. This material
was no ordinary Teflon; it was their company’s proprietary Gore-Tex membrane, a
sheet of expanded PTFE, with nine billion pores per square inch.
The founder’s son and lead engineer,
Bob Gore, conceived a unique way of stretching the Teflon to create a porous
membrane. Joe offered the photo, a photomicrograph. The microscopic view of the
material showed an intricately interlaced system of fibers and nodes that
constituted a semi-permeable membrane. The microscopic structure and
hydrophobic chemical properties allowed for the passage of water vapor but not
water droplets. Joe’s pitch was more than interesting. It was riveting. This
material had functional properties that loudly shouted ‘Breakthrough
Technology!’
After the theoretical explanation,
we witnessed a physical demonstration that would change everything. Joe asked
Nicolai if he could get a cup of hot coffee. Nicolai returned with a mug that
was steaming with the hot beverage. Instead of hoisting the coffee mug up for a
sip, Joe laid the thin white membrane over the opening at the top and secured
it around the perimeter with a heavy rubber band.
Wisps of steam emerged from the hot
coffee, rising through the membrane. Joe reached for the mug, held it up, and
slowly turned it upside down. The coffee was trapped inside by the membrane, but
not a droplet escaped. The steaming vapor continued to pour through even though
the hot liquid coffee was in full contact with the interior surface of the
membrane. Joe’s demonstration absolutely stunned us. Our jaws dropped. We
looked at each other in silence, our eye communication speaking volumes. This
semi-porous membrane had the technological magic we had been seeking. The road
ahead now looked clear and bright. We had the material for our second act.
The membrane itself had little
structural integrity. So, W.L. Gore laminated the membrane with a sandwich of
1.5 oz ripstop nylon on one side and a non-woven polyester scrim - they called
it nexus - on the other. The fabrics and membrane were bonded together with
thousands of tiny adhesive dots arrayed in a matrix pattern. The sandwich of
materials was named the Gore-Tex laminate. It was the first application of the
expanded PTFE in a fabric.
When Joe asked if we were interested
in receiving some sample yardage, we all nodded a big ‘yes.’ Key people at many
larger companies had all seen Joe’s pitch. Presumably, all were smart and none
lazy. Had they passed? Or were they jumping on this new technology in a race to
market? We did not know, and we couldn’t assume anything. We had to move. Right
now!
I ordered fifteen yards, explaining
we had prototype tent patterns that I could quickly adapt to test the new
Gore-Tex laminate. We emphasized our will to act. As Joe left, I remember
saying, “If this works, it could be big, really big.”
After counting the days, I tore open
the end of the brown cardboard tube and pulled out the sample yardage from W.L.
Gore. A bright yellow fabric with an orange cast
emerged. We named the color Acapulco Gold. It signified the hue and also
something powerful and desirable. I quickly unrolled the fabric onto the
cutting table and laid out our new patterns. Anticipating the Gore-Tex fabric,
I had already revised the old Potent patterns. I ditched the differential vents
and made other changes to improve the tent and make it ready for the Gore-Tex
laminate.
We cut and sewed up three prototype
tents and tested them in my backyard in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.
That night was perfect, damp and chilly. We crawled into our respective tents,
zipped the doors shut, and spent the night in our sleeping bags. We awoke with
the dawn without any noticeable condensation inside the tents, even though the
outer shells of the tents were wet with water droplets. This first test
encouraged us forward.
We now needed a name. We
brainstormed in earnest, all wanting to be the author. Most names struck out.
Z-man proposed the Light Dimension, and it stuck. Our new tent weighed three-and-a-half pounds, which was significantly lighter than the six- to
eight-pound weights of the conventional 2-person A-frame backpacking tents. And
it introduced a new dimension to the outdoor experience, one without annoying
condensation inside the tent.
While we exhibited the Light
Dimension at the Sunset Magazine Outdoor Show in Menlo Park earlier in the year,
we effectively launched the Light Dimension to a larger audience with a direct
marketing mailer on May 1, 1976. Since we already had a small mailing list, Z-man
suggested augmenting it with rented subscriber lists from Off Belay and
a few other outdoor magazines to target and pitch the performance attributes
of our new product.
Z-man pulled out all the stops for
our Light Dimension mailer. The mailing envelope featured a young parka-clad
man smiling and holding a small bag in his extended hand. On the lower right of
the envelope, a large bold type proclaimed,
“In this Bag is an Amazing New Tent. Its Weight? Just 3-1/2 lbs. Details Inside…”
Inside the envelope was an
introductory letter, a product brochure, a $20 off coupon, a certificate with
“Your Guarantee of Satisfaction,” an order form, and a pre-stamped business
reply envelope. Ron included every element of the selling cycle. The letter had
a handwritten message printed below the letterhead, “Special introductory offer
– Try this amazing new 3-1/2 lb. tent at no risk and save $20.” The letter praised
our Omnipotent and introduced the new ultralight Light Dimension and described
the revolutionary new laminated fabric as “The Barrier that Breathes.”
The “Save $20” certificate looked a
bit like currency. Its engraved image of Ben Franklin gazed past the typed
message. Who wouldn’t trust Ben Franklin? There was a call to action that
stated the offer expired at midnight on July 1, 1976. And if all that wasn’t
enough, the opening statement inside the brochure announced in bold type,
“Introducing a New Dimension in Outdoor Pleasure…”
And resist, they did not. Customers responded in droves. We soon had so many orders that we papered three walls of our tiny office with them. We mapped the dates of their backpacking plans onto a planning calendar. And with push pins, we rearranged their orders on our office wall to align manufacturing and fulfillment priorities. To hell with filling orders based on the sequential time of receipt. If we could help it, no customer order would go unfulfilled. And none did.
Fifty years ago, in May of 1976, our little company, Early Winters, created and introduced the world’s first Gore-Tex consumer product, the Light Dimension tent. It fulfilled a latent demand so strong that it propelled our fledgling enterprise from obscurity to overnight success. We soon introduced the world’s first Gore-Tex mountaineering shell garments in the spring of 1977. And the rest, as they say, is history. Footnote: Many of us still have them and use them today. The last photo is from a camp in the Mount Baker area, taken last year.
