Growth

Recently, due to our order limiting, there have been a few questions popping up about Timmermade scaling to meet more demand. What people don’t understand is that this is incredibly skilled work, with literally no pool from which to hire from. Sure, there are a few places around the US that have a small pool of outdoor gear sewists to pull from, but it is extremely rare, and small in the places it exists. Everywhere else, you might find someone with sewing experience, but it doesn’t really apply. It is a small head start, but for the most part, it is training from zero. I think pack makers probably have it a bit easier since the fabrics and skills are more basic and familiar to your average home sewist who is used to working with fabric with structure and forgiveness. However, sewing with UL fabrics, working with down, bonding DCF……these things are really difficult and totally different than sewing normal stuff. So what that means, is that if I want to hire someone in order to meet more demand, I need to pull myself out of production and spend a lot of highly stressful time training, likely for at least a year, before a person could be competent on just a couple of the items we make. It isn’t like hiring some line cooks to meet demand in a restaurant or something. Sure, restaurants (and everyone else) are having trouble finding enough help these days, but at least the is a pool of people who knows how to do that job, or the potential that those people exist. They literally don’t exist for a business like Timmermade. It is guaranteed training from zero.

Around the same time as when these questions popped up around, an email also came in from a company in Utah that offered “help with production”. Skeptical, I left the possibility open that maybe this was a small production facility that would be worth chatting with. Maybe there would be some possibility to collaborate with some of the more popular Timmermade items that we could have in stock, ready to sell. Nope. My skepticism was justified and the company was aiming to insert itself as a go-between to Asian production. Essentially, this exemplifies my view of typical modern American business. They just want to play on social media and pull a slice of the pie away from those doing the real work. This situation was just too closely related to why Timmermade can’t easily find help.

From another angle, I’m not sure I would even want Timmermade to grow, if it could. From a product performance standpoint, growth is really bad. The bigger we grow, the more quality control becomes and issue. The more investment there is, the more a need for marketing and advertising to drum up sales. The more effort put into marketing, the less that goes into the products. Then, there is the question of whether I want to cast a bigger net to consumers. I think good performance requires an educated user and as soon as the pool gets big enough to apply to the general public, the products get dumbed down to these generic, gimmicky, fashion pieces that come in pretty colors, sold by spokespeople shouting in your face. Even if I controlled every aspect and put out exactly what we are putting out now, the general public would use it wrong, demand compromising features, and force our hand. I hope that we stay small and relatively untainted by consumerism, with the primary focus on the items we hand build. These days, the model is often to build a marketing plan and then sorta “insert mediocre product here”. I care about the performance of the item being made, the integrity of the way it was made, the relationships with the people using the gear, end of story.

It is really an unreasonable “want your cake and eat it too” scenario to think you can have what Timmermade produces, but in the normal US consumer model, which is a low effort, “get what I want, when I want it” model, with a no questions asked return policy at the end. Instead of complaining about how long the wait time is, we should all be grateful that the true cottage industry gear is even available to the UL market. The only place you’ll ever get that level of innovation is through small producers.

I sorta feel like Timmermade is in a sweet spot, right now in 2024. I mean a sweet spot for the consumer. I dunno….ask me in a year, but when a cottage brand is just starting out, often you’ll see some cool and innovative initial product direction happening, but the skillset often isn’t quite there. Fortunately I worked through much of this time before Timmermade was a real business. That said, we are always learning and my ever-changing standards would always look back at little details that no one else would notice and view those older items as completely useless…because a seam allowance was done slightly different or whatever. However, for some time now, I have really felt like things are super dialed. I look at products I built a year ago and can’t really find a fault. I hardly ever have projects that don’t go together smoothly and every day I feel like things are just dialed in. I think this might normally be when a business would start to follow the US model where we would grow and outsource to meet demand, but I think this is where quality starts to trail off. Actually, maybe businesses, even in the cottage industry, start out with this model. From my seat, growth means more people involved and more disconnect. Outsourcing means you bang out a design and lock it in to a bunch of inventory. That inventory and overseas production is a big investment so you have to pour all this effort into marketing and advertising to make sure you can sell it all. There is less communication with the customer base and those customers are less educated on how to use the gear properly, so the products need to change in order to accommodate unintended usage. As it is now, it’s me building items each day and using those items each day. Making little tweaks is easy and can happen from project to project. The products just constantly evolve. If a new idea pops into my head, I am able to make it happen the next day and the skillset is there to execute it well. The innovation is still there, the small scale production is still there, the skillset is dialed, but yeah, you gotta compete to get an order in and you need to wait a little bit for it. That is the necessary drawback to getting the end product.

One example of gear getting sorta “dumbed down” that hits home is the Timmermade temp rating change. The goal of the old temp rating was aimed, specifically, towards the ultralighter. The amount of fill used was meant to hit a sweet spot of enough insulation for the average person to stay warm at the set temp. Strangely, some on the UL world use overall warmth of a sleep system as their gauge of quality. Well, it is easy to simply sell a 10 degree as a 20 degree and satisfy that crowd, but that shouldn’t be the goal. The goal is to bring what you need to stay safe and warm, but not carry around a bunch of extra weight you don’t need. If you want to have a buffer, then it should be YOU that chooses whether to have it or not by over-insulating to the amount you choose. The culture now sort of pushes gear companies to over-insulate because that will make happy customers. Yay! It’s warm! Warmer means better! No, not really. We’re trying to hit a warmth to weight target, not build the outright warmest thing. Anyway, this culture sucked Timmermade in a few years ago. A few folks, out of hundreds, ended up a little cold for whatever reason. I mean, in their defense, they may have been used to the industry standard of including a larger buffer, for the general public…..or, maybe they just were the general public. I don’t know. Either way, cold people speak louder than warm people I guess. So the fill amount in our systems went up and the strategy changed to avoid anyone ever being cold, anywhere near the temp set point. This is clearly at odds with the UL mindset and the end result is really the the majority of folks are carrying probably about 10 degrees more insulation than they need to stay warm. Pretty much all the feedback we get these days indicates that most people can comfortably take a Timmermade system (not Serpentes, which uses the old rating system) down at least 10 degrees below its rating…..but that’s how it happens. I could have stood my ground and kept the UL focused rating, but the forums would have labeled Timmermade as “not as warm”. Hoards of miseducated folks would completely miss the point and spread the word. The easiest path out was to simply bump the rating….you guessed it…..10 degrees. The loser here is the ULer. Now they are carrying 10 degrees too much insulation. Fortunately, the educated ULer can just bump the rating up 10 and have the same system as before.

5 thoughts on “Growth”

  1. ” Instead of complaining about how long the wait time is, we should all be grateful that the true cottage industry gear is even available to the UL market”

    Yes. Exactly this. Thank you for making quality UL products and for not being intimidated by attitudes of entitlement. Your down sweaters are literally half the weight of production competition while being warmer and cheaper. Super grateful.

  2. Appreciate you taking the time to address these points.

    Out of curiosity, with how you’re running the business are there non production/design components that can still be improved (more on the administrative side of things)?

    Always cool to hear how one can run their business exactly how they want.

    Cheers,
    F

    1. Oh, I’m sure……but “improved” is subjective in many cases. A marketing person’s head might explode if they took a quick look at what we do, or more accurately, what we don’t. Aside from my sporadic Instagram posts, we don’t do any marketing and many would say that could be “improved”, but I say, well, I don’t want to. I think marketing is shallow and usually appeals to the lowest common denominator. It often has a direct correlation to a reduction in the quality of the gear the entity makes. More marketing and advertising, less innovation and overall quality. It’s not a rule, but it often seems like it. A web person would freak out if they took a look at our product photos. They are pretty much all just taken with my phone and they’d say we would bring in more sales if we had so super pro photos out in the field up there. I say our crappy photos discourage fashion purchases, which we don’t want. A web person would also see our ordering process and immediately understand it as prohibitive. We could take in more sales if we made it easier to purchase, but I say making our customers do a little work weeds out the low effort consumer. I believe that, in order to get performance out of our gear, we need to sell to educated consumers. If our purchasing process requires some due diligence from the consumer, we both can get the details right and we ensure that the person getting the items will know what to do with it. In terms of administration, paperwork, business stuff……yeah, I’m certain a lot of that could improve. Pretty much any time I need to do anything business related, I’m hacking my way through it, trying to figure it out from square one, and always finishing up wondering if I did it correctly or not. This one has no benefit to me. I’d love if I could just breeze through taxes, paying sub contractors, finding and buying materials, etc, etc.

  3. Dan, You are a LEGEND Sir! Keep doing what you love. I will wait as long as required for your skilled labor and innovative designs. The whiners don’t deserve your time! Keep at it, I can wait as long as needed to support your cottage American made brand.

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