I recently had the opportunity to speak with Henry Shires, owner of TarpTent, based out of Nevada City, California (population ~3,000) and one of the original outdoor cottage companies.

Let us just jump right into this interview!

Continue reading “Interview: TarpTent” →

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ron ‘Fallingwater’ Moak, owner of Six Moon Designs, based out of Beaverton, Oregon (population ~90,000) and one of the original outdoor cottage companies.

Ron started Six Moon Designs back in 2002 with TarpTent and Nunatak being two of the few start-ups that are still around and older than Six Moon Designs. And while not the first to introduce shelters made of cuben fiber (as it was called at the time) Six Moon Designs was producing DCF shelters back in the 2008 era. Eight years later, now in 2016, many are wondering if they have finally thrown in the towel on this fabric, but more on that below.

Six Moon Designs has been a company that maintains a very narrow focus on a few products, with little energy spent on trying to come up with the next big thing, and instead focusing their efforts on constantly trying to refine their current products. In an age when most cottage companies fly with the times and are constantly putting efforts into new products that oft do not make it more than one or two generation cycles, Six Moon Designs has constantly stood by the business model of putting years of effort into a new product to make sure it is great and stands the test of time.

Continue reading “Interview: Six Moon Designs” →

Love it, hate it, trying to ignore it exists, or completely committed to it – cuben fiber has continued to prove itself for the last decade, against all odds, even at times when almost everybody in the industry wanted it to just go away – and many still do. Through it all, cuben fiber has been the mysterious product of a rather small company based out of Mesa, Arizona USA, called Cubic Tech Corporation. There is no doubting it anymore, Cuben fiber, or cuben fibre if you are from across the pond, has become a mainstay of the outdoor hiking industry over the last decade. It has proven itself to excel in many ways. It has also had a few blunders along the way. Over the years some cottage companies started importing other fabrics in an attempt to get cuben fiber to ‘go away’, yet cuben fiber prevailed. It has become a fabric that a few outdoor hiking cottage companies have fully committed themselves too – and grow they have! Other outdoor hiking cottage companies have used it sparing, while other companies totally sworn it off – and at least two or three of those companies have started to sell cuben fiber products over the last two years – is this a sign of its popularity and potential lost of business, or has the fabric reached a point where it has proven itself to even the diehard-anti-cuben-fiber-crowd. What is unquestionable is that cuben fiber has survived both the good and and bad times.

On 13 May 2015, a news release was announced from Heerlen, Netherlands that Cubic Tech Corporation had been bought out.

The buyers: well known fabric manufacturer Dyneema, a subsidiary of DSM Dyneema, a subsidiary of DSM, officially known as Koninklijke Dsm Nv.

Expect this article to be a huge leap away from any previous article I have published. In it we are going to get an insiders look of what the consequences and/or advantages of Cubic Tech Corp (herein CTC) being sold means to a number of the outdoor hiking cottage companies that most of my readers buy their hiking gear from. If you do not care about cuben fiber, there is no reason to keep reading. If you do not care about what the outdoor hiking cottage company owners think about cuben fiber, there is no reason to keep reading. If you have utterly no desire at all what happens within the industry side of hiking, yep, there is no reason to keep reading. I fully know this article will only appeal to the die-hard gear geeks out there. This topic interests me, and this is my website, so I am writing about it.

Continue reading “Cubic Tech Corp Buyout. A Cottage Q&A” →