Timmermade has been officially producing gear since 2016, with MYOG hobby building going back to around 2010. There was some sporadic work before that. It became a business on it’s own, really. I was originally inspired by some friends who hiked the Appalachian Trail with some simple gear they had made on their own. From there I pulled apart an old sleeping bag I had to see how it was made and re-make it into a new one. I also ordered up some materials and tried my hand at a super basic synthetic sleeping bag. All went well with those, but I didn’t go much further till later on in life when I started looking for good wool clothing. I found that the prices for what I was looking for were excessive and I decided to make my own wool jackets, hoodies, and pants out of old surplus army wool blankets. These are some of my favorite clothing items to this day, but this led me down a path of gear making where the ultimate test of skill was to make super ultralight stuff. At the time I wasn’t overly interested in this genre, but it was a challenge and I had a friend who was very interested. He became Timmermade’s first customer with an early jacket and quilt. I eventually came around to the ways of the ultralight community (weight is pain!) and started making more of the stuff for myself. It wasn’t long before it was proposed that I try to sell my items. I posted a picture on social media of something I made with a little hint about how I should “take orders” and that is exactly what happened. Timmermade went on like that for a while where I would make some gear, post pictures of it and that would bring in some orders, which I would then post and so on. There started to be a word-of-mouth going around that kept some business coming in too. However, I realized that even though it was going along on it’s own, I really liked where it was going. Making shelter. It’s the number 1 item on the primitive skills to-do list and our most primitive need as humans. Yeah, it’s a lot of high tech stuff, but in the end it’s the same basic goal. To stay warm and dry. I’m a big fan of spending the day pushing the limits, but then being cozy and comfy, almost luxurious, at camp and I spend many hours thinking about how to do this in an ultralight package.
In 2016, I was planning a final exit from my long professional cycling career, which spanned back to the early 90s for cycling and mid-2000s in a professional capacity. As a primarily domestic pro, I became quite used to earning very little money, so the transition into involuntary entrepreneurship was seamless. For those 4 pre-pandemic years, Timmermade was just me, and it was quite mobile. I would work from my off-grid, solar powered cabin in the Ithaca, New York area in the spring, summer, fall. Then I would pack up and work from near the Mexico border and Arizona Trail in southern Arizona in the winter. I have a great love for that region with its Sky Islands and unique biodiversity. I also have a great love for the Finger Lakes, ADK, northern PA, and NEUS. When my life was thrown into a major transition in 2020 and the pandemic began to flood Timmermade with orders, I settled the business down in Trumansburg, NY and hired my first employee. We rented a temporary space on Main st that wasn’t being used, due to the pandemic and I picked up a couple of big industrial machines.
Since those pandemic days, we’ve moved downstairs from where we were and we’ve had as many as six people working on production one time. Well, not exactly at the same time, but the same time period. We have a tiny space that really only allows two people to work at a time, so that resulted in a real part-time rotation of people in and out. These days, we stick with 3 -4 people. Even if we had more space for more people, this is such high-skill labor that it is very difficult to find people who are ultimately capable of doing it. There is basically nobody out there who can just do it, so it requires huge amounts of training, and even then, probably half can ultimately meet standards consistently. Therefore, Timmermade continues to chip away in the ways that we can and limit our workload through a merit-based lottery system.
I’ve really fallen back in love with our highly variable weather, dense forests, and rugged landscapes. I think it is a fantastic place to design gear. There is no shortage of all kinds of challenging testing conditions. When assessing a place, I’ve always put a much higher emphasis on the people and community over the rating scale of outdoor recreation. I want to be in a place with lots of public lands and outdoor recreation, but I stop short of the tendency to become picky about how “good” your recreation opportunities are. I think that starts to view nature as little more than a human playground for our cheap thrills. I can remember someone here complaining, at some point, that they had to drive 4hrs to do anything “cool”. Basically, their view of what is “cool” had narrowed to the point that it excluded everything cool around them and focused in on one niche thing they did not have local access to. So they go off on this journey of always seeking out the perfect conditions for whatever niche activity is in fashion and likely land in some place where you wait in line at the trailhead. It’s a huge generalization, but I often find these places tend to gather posers and people with little substance. Ithaca is NOT that. Sure, you can never get away from that totally, but Ithaca has lots of great community and tons of excellent outdoor fun.