The sun sets on the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. (atbaker / flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/atbaker/ / CC BY 2.0
A lot of hurdles stand between an average weekend backpacker and the dream of creating your own gear company. Just ponder that a moment – You want to make your own hiking boots/backpacks/sleeping bags? Would you even know where to start?
Such deterrents did not sway Seth Haber, the 31-year-old founder of Trek Light Gear, based in Boulder, Co. Fatigued with uncomfortably sleeping on ground pads and in stuffy tents, Haber in 2002 conducted some research to learn how to sleep better in the backcountry, when he wasn’t working his job as a computer guy for a local medical group. That’s when he discovered hammocks. Three years later, he started his own company, which has expanded now to sell tote bags as well as backpacking hammocks.
Haber agreed to a Q&A with Compass Points during which he retold his story of backpacker turned gear company founder and the advantages hammocks have over tents:
CP: I’m a tent guy. I always have been. What am I missing by not hiking in a hammock?
SETH: One of the things that started to bother me was I would wake up in a tent in the morning, and the first thing that I would want to do is get the heck out of the tent. When you wake up, it can be a sweat box in there. It ruined some of my mornings. I didn’t like that feeling of not really being able to regulate that.
One of the things that I love is when you get out of a hammock you wake up exactly where you want to be, you’re in a comfortable spot, have great air flow going and you don’t have to have that I-have-to-get-out-of-here-as-soon-as-possible feeling.
You’re backpacking to have that closeness with nature, that experience out there, and you sort of lose some of that when at the end of the night all of a sudden you’re in your tent. In a hammock, you have that open air feeling.
CP: How does it not only keep you warm but dry and bug free?
SETH: I would say the same principles that apply to tent camping are going to apply to a hammock. It’s almost like a floating tent. What I do with Trek Light Gear, I make sure everything is modular so that anything you need – a bug net or a rain fly – you can mix and match and get what you want out of it.
You get this flexibility with it. If you’re in an area where bugs are really a problem, you throw out a mosquito net. We sell a 360 degree cocoon that goes around the hammock. With the rain fly, you set it up right over the hammock, and you can set it up just like a tarp system.
Cold air and insulation, that’s definitely what I hear most people asking about. You’re exposed to the air. You’re going to lose heat out through the bottom of your hammock and out through the top. In the hammock, you have a number of different options. You can climb right in, you can bring in your sleeping bag, you can put a sleeping pad underneath you in the hammock, and it’s just like a tent.
You can also purchase an under quilt, which we don’t currently sell. It’s like a down bag that lips onto the bottom of the hammock so you’re insulating yourself.
CP: What was life like before Trek Light Gear?
SETH: My career path was not necessarily headed in this direction. I graduated in 2002 with a computer science degree and started working for a medical company doing a lot of I.T. stuff and taking advantage of Colorado as much as possible. I grew up camping and really enjoying the outdoors. The more and more I started camping out here, the more I realized how great it was, but why am I not getting the best night sleep sleeping on the ground? I would wake up having tossed and turned all night.
I gradually explored what else was out there. I tried one of those mesh camping hammocks, and that was a turning point even though it was uncomfortable. It was like sleeping in a fishing net. It made me realize there’s something to getting off the ground and having a nice, lightweight bed that I could set up anywhere.
I kept my day job for a very long time during the process of getting the business started, and it finally turned into spending my days in a cubical and doing (gear) shows on the weekend. I felt like Bruce Wayne living a dual life, and I realized I enjoyed the hammock life and not the cubical life.
(Seth quit his job in 2008 just as his company was downsizing and laying people off to focus on Trek Light Gear).
CP: How does a hiker become a gear entrepreneur?
SETH: I have a manufacturer based in Bali who makes the hammocks. This was an interesting process. It was me saying that I needed a piece of gear and it has to be out there. I started looking for other options after the fish net hammock. The hammock has been around forever, and the design is not something I take credit for. I’m not the inventor. It was more about me going out there, God bless the Internet, doing a lot of research to see what had been tried before, what materials to use and what smaller companies were doing that in the market. I was able to find it all without necessarily reinventing the wheel.
I thought, this is awesome and solves my problem. Yet it was difficult for me to track down a product like this. If this solves my problem, and it’s hard to find, it needs to be marketed and needs to get out there because a lot of people would be interested in that kind of thing.
It was a classic example of learning everything as you go.
*DISCLAIMER – Compass Points in February 2010 entered an affiliate agreement with Trek Light Gear. Trek Light Gear has an advertisement posted on the Compass Points blog, and Compass Points receives a commission of 8 percent on any sales referred to Trek Light Gear via Compass Points. This relationship between Compass Points and Trek Light Gear has no bearing on Compass Points’s editorial content or decision making. Any questions can be referred to Compass Points publisher/managing editor Dave Pidgeon at davepidgeon@compasspointsmedia.com.
