#35 - King of Kickstarter

pete design of a brand that makes some really fantastic products there's a lot of good thing to say about the peak design everything everyday back i don't think i've ever been this excited to talk about a bag this is the peak design travel tri hard it has a lot of unique elements that i've never seen on a tripod before this thing is so hot right now your granny is probably talking about it every day backpack from peak designs really really fucking awesome back tons of innovation tons of things to be like really celebrated if there's awards for bags this should win all of them just because it's like game changer we are the company that's earned the second most on kickstarter in our collective history a little north of thirty million dollars going back to twenty ten that's when i quit my job i was a construction engineer and i'm living on my savings with about twenty five grand i did like a four month walk about when i was twenty five i went into india and southeast asia and australia zealand i had a camera with me the whole time a real pain in the ass carry with me because it's on a strap and it's banging chest i just came up with this idea it's this clip that clamps onto to a backpack strap and then your camera is immediately accessible totally hands free lock into your camera strap when you need it push the button pull it out so we totally solve that problem to this day we sell millions every year there is nothing as sweet as that first kickstarter when the money comes rolling in and people are saying i like that idea that's incredible i just sold a thing that i haven't even made yet to a guy in england that i've never right this is magic god the internet is cool you got the friends and family email that goes out and that's the extent of the marketing that i did i mean that is the sum total is i emailed my friends and family you know frankly the whole entrepreneurial side funding a business where you got out there and you raise money and you you ramp up the stakes did not even cross my mind like oh should i raise money for this right no it's ridiculous i'm gonna make the fucking thing you know last year i think we had an average of thirty eight employees and we did somewhere between sixty five and a million five million is nine a alone ten million fifty million money million dollars hundred billion dollar half a billion hundred and fifteen million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually have threats to these like giant multi million dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy add two more zeros first million every week we sit down with self made millionaires and ask them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories where all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like and shit with the i ask them how do you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million we're good to go cool so peter from peak design how are you i'm doing just fine man it's a it's a new year we're ready to rock we're ready to go okay cool was telling you right before this these are my favorite types of interviews where we just met i don't know your full story i know enough to know that it's interesting but i don't know what are all the details and so i'm gonna be discovering it for the first time because in some of these interviews i already know the i'm just trying to get the greatest hits out of the artist i'm trying to get you to play your your best stories that i already know in this case i don't know exactly what they are so we'll be figuring it out together fair enough i like to play that greatest sell myself no problem and so the reason i think this is interesting is because you make a product that is very relatable that i want that a lot of people want i think your background was kind of interesting where you weren't just one of those people who said i wanna start a business just for starting a business sake necessarily it sounded like you've got phenomenal success on kickstarter so give people a sense of two things what does the company do sure and then the second thing is give us a sense of scale i like to talk about you know what you guys have achieved because really we're gonna work backwards and say great how'd do you start but if people don't know what you've achieved they'll tune out within five minutes because they're like i don't know why i should care why should they care alright well let's see here scale we are at present i think the company that's earned the the second most on kicks starter in our collective history somewhere a little north of thirty million dollars on kickstarter maybe maybe thirty two or so who would be first pebble yep pebble was first three three campaigns twelve million twelve million and twenty million dollars on their campaigns smartwatch who knew yeah me i guess apple and samsung also knew in any case i i think with our with our twenty twenty kickstarter which it should be no surprise to people we're gonna be doing another kickstarter in twenty twenty i'm very optimistic that we're gonna take that spot i think our next product is going to be certainly the most widely adopted i think one of the coolest and no i can't share with you what it is i'm sorry it's gonna be a lot of fun okay so tell people what what does the company do what are you guys making in so going back to a twenty ten that's when i quit my job i was a construction engineer and for about two years i had this idea and kinda tinkering around in my head after i did like a four month walk about when i was twenty five i i went on a leave of absence from work i went to india and southeast asia and australia and new zealand i had a camera with me the whole time and it was great because i was you know i fancy myself a photographer and a writer and having that little semi spiritual journey as a as a young buck and what what is a walk about is it how does that actually work you so you take you take some time you travel and you do what well i think quite specifically you don't make a plan okay you you just go figure it out so i bought a one way to take it to hong kong and arrived at six am and had literally no idea what to do it was kind of weird because i'd never asked it i didn't like and the funny thing is it dawned on me for the first time as i got off the train i was like holy shit i'd don't know what to do because it was also six am and there was no like you can't check to a hostel or something like that so anyway and you decided to do that because what my buddy dave was three years older than me coincidentally that he's my cfo now and he had taken five leaves of absence from ernst and young where he was working and it was just a cool thing that he did as he just go explore the world right and say it doesn't if you don't hire me back that's fine but you know i'll come back if you got a job for me and it just worked for him and so that was kind confidence in the inspiration for for traveling once you experienced that you know i'd i'd studied abroad in college and went to europe for my first time first time out of the country and it was clear that travel it's just it's so full of novelty you know one of the coolest things in this world is doing something for the first time right and travel is the opportunity to do that non nonstop right i love yeah i studied abroad and it wasn't really a tough decision on my part but i trying to convince friends to do it and they were all coming up with reasons not to and i just told him i said look look at the year ahead of us the people who studied abroad won't shut up about it mh and none of them regret so like what are the odds it's really gonna be like a bad thing we're probably gonna end up just like them not shutting up about it not regretting that's exactly what have that is exactly what happened it's not it's you're batting a thousand across that right every time every time so you're on the walk about yeah and i had a camera with me the whole time and it was a real pain in the ass to carry with me because it's on a strap and it's banging against your chest and you look like a tourist you are a tourist but you know you're wearing the badge yeah that's right you're wearing the badge but it's essential if you're a photographer you have to have it with you so i just came up with this idea which actually doesn't necessarily make you look like too much less of a tool but is incredible useful it's this clip that clamps on to a backpack strap and then your camera is immediately accessible totally hands free locked into your camera strap when you need it push the button and pull it out right and to this day i think peak design makes a hundred and twenty different skews at least we still sell hundreds of thousands of capture camera clips every year and yet almost ten years running now it's just a fantastic product and people used to put this just around the neck right you're just yeah hang your camera around your neck this sort of heavy dslr camera around your neck well and and i'd say certainly that's still the most common way people do it of course at the time i was you know when i was twenty six i was like no one is ever gonna use a next strap again we have revolution the world and in retrospect a little bit more more humbly it's like well the thing is it's actually kind of a niche case in that niche case it's an excellent product but it's not the b all end all and that realization came soon enough and actually that led us to our second product which was a camera strap but guess what this one solve the problem of you know what what's a real pain in the ass removing camera stops and putting them back on it's a ridiculously complex friction mechanism that is hard to figure out on your own so we totally solve that problem and camera straps again to this day are our very best selling product we sell millions of camera straps every year and so now we've got clips and now we've got straps and we're chugging along about four years into this business and a very well known photographer named trey rack called us up and said hey you guys are solving all the problems in photography and you're doing it in cool ways i wanna make a camera bag with you guys okay and so given that this guy was gonna throw his considerable reach behind it we endeavor to design a camera bag and that was you know we were not bag designers but we took the exact same fresh approach to making a camera bag that we did everything else and we said what are the actual problems and that's what peak design i think has been really really good at over the years is truly discerning what the actual problems are not paying attention to the gimmicks and then just executing beautifully and elegantly on those problems right and and being very clear about that in our marketing here's is the problem this is why we did it i think it looks nice what do you think wow i like the way you said that and i like the principal but i like the way you said it more because i found that when i do these interviews mh there's like two things that will just stick with me from each one and i know that's one of them and it's not gonna sound warmed up it's not gonna sound profound but to me it sinks in because the best principles tend to be the simplest ones if you can actually drill them into your head and stick to it and not get distracted and it sounds like that's what you guys did so you go from construction engineer which i don't know exactly what that means but i'm imagining yellow hat on you i don't know what i don't know if that's true that's you gotta job and the first thing you made was this the clip u how do you go about making a product where do you like you don't you don't know how to do that that's true i did not know how to do that and i i look back on that period of my life and i i think i know i would know what to do now much better mh than i did then but whatever i did it worked and what it what it was was i first made crude prototypes i mean really ugly things out of plastic and wood to prove the very basic concept and i was like yep you can hang a camera from your backpack right and then i used a tool that i'd i've gotten pretty good at from construction called sketchup mh sketchup is a three d cad modeling software but it pretty much only handles right angles i've used sketchup it's like the kind of beginner thing right is it yeah i like it's not like auto cad it's like it's it's not solid was it's free is that why i used it it is free okay you can pay for it now and it certainly has broader application especially for architects and things like that but i took that simple product and and made it do curves and made it do angles and certainly a great tool for kind of my conceptual three dimensional design of what this thing might look right and so even though it's not a mechanical engineer's program of choice by any stretch i maxed it out and was able to crank out three d printed prototypes and just kinda further refine the concept and on a hiking trail one time i met this a sixty year old dude old school hip who has got a little compound outside auburn and i told him about my camera clip and he's told me that he was a mach and that he would make a prototype for me if i came and visit him okay so i went up to auburn and stayed in his guest trailer and at this point are you thinking this is a company or you're just like i'm making this clip for fun or what's your mindset at that time okay so i don't think i was thinking that it was a company i was fixated on the product itself but i had every belief that this product was going to pay the bills i just thought it was so damn useful right that it was gonna pay the bills and i'm living on my savings i i quit my job with about twenty five grand in savings and you quit to do this you were to do this you told your boss you told your family and your friends are like i'm gonna make this camera yeah and would they say gosh that's funny you know i i certainly don't remember encountering like jeez man you're crazy i recall encouragement i suppose but but it was it was very much a solo journey you know i think that you know people will cite bravery or something like that i kinda pushed back on that the fact is i was a you know twenty five year old dude with an engineering degree right and twenty five grand in my pocket like the worst that was gonna happen is i don't have twenty five grand in my pocket and i will be an engineer again right you know yeah it didn't i wasn't super out there on on some cliff you were realistic about your risk i was realistic about my risk and i also wasn't in the you know frankly the whole entrepreneurial side of of funding a business where you go out there and you raise money and you you ramp up the stakes right away or you i mean you're not gonna get debt financing when you don't when you don't have any to show so that's not even an option but it didn't even occur to me i was like i'm going to make this thing and then i am going to sell it right that'll be the money part that would be the money part and i'm gonna sell it for more than i made it right that's all there is to it i did it did not even cross my mind like oh should i raise money for this right no it's ridiculous i'm make the fucking thing right and then even y'all kickstarter right done thirty million and kickstarter u and people say crowdfunding funding to me this is like you're pre you're selling your product you're just selling it before you're hey here's what i'm gonna do if you're interested buy it now i'll use that money to make it it's not donations or equity in your company right no it's not donations not equity and you're also i think done correctly you're not putting it up there to say hey world i made this thing and if you tell me that it's great i will i will go and go out there and complete it right i'm this you're like yeah i'm doing this i'm launching this kick start launch this idea and and give that cash up upfront it's actually a perfect exchange right you're giving away a little bit of margin for cash upfront and they're getting the product for cheaper and they get to be the evangelist and have a closer personal connection to it kickstarter definitely didn't intend or there to be a ton of product companies that are going out there and selling million dollars of dollars worth of stuff they intended for artists to say hey i wanna make a cool thing it's gonna cost five thousand dollars for me to produce but if you guys pay for it ahead of time i'll produce it right we kind of flipped the model on its head as it's the other earlier kickstarter successes but obviously that's what's really propelled kickstarter into what it is today alright it's twenty twenty new year it's gonna be a big year and you know we had to come in with some new awesome partners so for january we partnering up with microsoft and my first million that's right this episode is brought you by microsoft because whether you're just starting out or you're well on your way to your first million microsoft teams can help your team hit the ground running with must have features like real time chat editing and video calling all in one easy to use platform teams is a no brainer at a price you can afford yep there is a free version of teams as in it cost zero dollars see for yourself at a k a dot m ms slash the hustle again that's a aka a dot ms slash the hustle to check out teams brought to you by microsoft i love it microsoft that is a trillion dollar company right we're talking about my first million they're they're on my first trillion so that's goals for everybody they got there because they build epic products microsoft word excel powerpoint these are products that stand the test of time and now they've come out with teams to help teams chat communicate it worked together and i think it's awesome alright great let's get back to this episode right and so this first one you did a kickstarter with yeah why why'd did you decided do that somebody said hey you should you should do a kickstarter or where did that come from like three people within the course of one week in january twenty eleven because i i had no business plan right mind you i was gonna make this thing and i was confident that i could get people to buy it but as far as selling it i was like don't know figure that out later you know had kick kickstarter or not come around this whole thing would probably be a slightly different story right and and that i would be here but i'd be talking to a construction that's right has own very cool clip probably wouldn't be talking to especially here i'd be on a site somewhere wishing that that the end of the day would come so three people recommend hey you a kickstarter you don't even know what this is at the time but i you know i check it out obviously and it's like oh no brainer this is what i'm going to do and then it's like it looks like i have to make a video and so i made my first and made and edited my first video right and the funny thing is is it became the second most funded project of all time ever on kickstarter at the time and i gotta say man i'm sure this sounds cocky i'm sure it sounds arrogant again but i wasn't the least bit surprised right thought it was such a good idea and i looked at the other projects that it that had made that had done better and i was like man capture is way more useful than that nice so i think this thing is gonna kill it right it did it totally did and it was a dream come true man like that there is nothing as sweet as that first kickstarter when the you know the the money comes rolling in and people are saying i like that idea it's just such affirmation of everything you've been working on right and it's a really do you remember like that morning when you you know you're waking up or you're you're seeing the orders come in what was that what where were you doing that day what what was it like i was working in the dog patch i was kinda of borrowing desk space in a little six person company that was called p which would eventually become packs and j okay when they were six people and i was hanging out there i pressed go on the kick i'm like well see what happens and i think it took like ninety seconds before some dude he couldn't even watched the whole video but some dude in england just a random person back to the project and as like holy shit that's incredible i just sold a thing that i haven't even made yet to a guy in england that i've never met right this is magic god the internet is cool you know and then they just started rolling in of course then you got the friends and family email that goes out and that's the extent of the marketing that i did i mean that is the sum total is i emailed my friends and family saying hey check this thing out maybe i posted on facebook i mean twenty twenty eleven yeah face and so it just got picked up by bloggers or what what was the spread like totally the first blog was pe pixel and the second blog was gizmo moto and it really it really did you do anything you know either unintentionally or unintentionally to help that spread did you have like really good assets or you know like nope nothing nope your kick kickstarter video was good like now that you look back on it or you're like that was a good one or your cringe oh it's it's it's it's actually beyond cringe it's in into it's into just laugh last country you know the cringe worthy ones are like years two through or maybe like three and four where you're like oh we're good at this now right and you you put something up there and it's like it's like oh this is emotional it's this gets at the at the heart right we are camera carriage yeah exactly exactly those are the ones where you're cri because you're like you know you're like oh god you're are so amateur right and now we've settled into something where i feel confident that we do know what we're doing and that and the products and also the marketing products in the collateral we put out are truly dialed on on kind of a a a global platform right that first kick kickstarter does how much five six million something that no no the first kick started three hundred and sixty four thousand dollars yeah which was good for second place of all time and then the next kickstarter we we did it was two hundred and fifteen thousand but it was like a twenty day campaign so in my mind because the dollars per day right were twice as much that was a better campaign and then the next one after that was capture version two same damn thing just a fair amount better that did like eight hundred and sixteen eight hundred and eighteen thousand and then we did slide and clutch which are basically camera straps which is kind of like our second kickstarter had been camera straps so straps v two that did eight hundred and sixty eight and in the meantime we of course like we had developed international distribution because when you go on kickstarter random mass people throughout the world to be like hey i live in croatia and i would like to be your distributor here and you you go prep and they're like sure like oh well great fantastic let's do it right we just say no more yeah exactly and and we've legitimately grown our distribution that way you know from all these people who started super small and now they are writing peak design into the it it like peak design has become the anchor tenant of their distribution companies mh that's the case in in hong kong which manages a ton of different asian countries that's the case in in france so is a case in the uk so it it feels really good did the czech republic our our czech republic distributor so these aren't these are not retailers these are distributors distributors yeah and so explain what how this works who's is this person what they buy from you then they sell to to the to to their and in some cases they're selling to a network of retailers right it's the middleman man we can't translate into check we'd don't have no capacity to understand the check market they do their boots on the ground there so we sell them a hundred dollar product we'd like to sell it to them for forty bucks so that keep that in mind these are the kind of details and information that people i think it's important to know yes they would like to have what's called sixty points margin to work with there and go turn that and they'll probably sell it you know they'll they'll take twenty bucks from that hundred dollar product and and the retailer will get forty right there's a lot of money a lot of the value of a product goes into the price of that resale right which is of course why direct to consumers is is is and so the for you guys which one are you guys fifty fifty is is direct consumer a bigger part of your business by volume wholesale is larger by volume of sales that is if you were to include amazon the websites and kickstarter and ebay for our for us secondary market just a little bit larger in terms of revenue gotcha yeah and so for you guys you start adding these channels i'm sure sort of organically right yeah we'll reach out oh this is a good idea we should do more of that right why aren't we on amazon we should get on amazon that sort of thing is that how things evolved yeah absolutely the notion of the the pre business where you sit down and you formulate your business plan i don't know that does exist but from my experience being good at business is about being good at reacting to what six inches in front of your face certainly the more i'm sure the proactive you can be the better you gotta remember that proactive is kind of a double edged sword because you might think you're being proactive but you can be just being inefficient meaning you think something's gonna be a good idea so you invest a lot of time effort energy into that and in retrospect monday morning quarterback says like yeah we didn't you know maybe we shouldn't have gone for selling to third party retailers and letting them sell on amazon that that kinda just ruined it so mh i don't know there are all sorts of situations where i think reactivity is every bit as wise as pro right and it certainly sets up for the natural tendency toward laziness that most humans have the balance there right is if you're gonna be highly adaptive and responding and reacting to what's coming your way you still need to do some proactive things to like create opportunities to to get things to just kick up the dust and let some new things come to so like the kickstarter create a whole bunch opportunities and then you reacted well to those and so how do you i guess what are the things that you proactively do to just sort of create some action kick the dust up a little well we only do one thing and that is design great products mh that and and every year we will have designed a great product and that i mean we're a product company so doing other ancillary things like you know the a lot of product like take away for for example we are not like a way they are they're a marketing company first they are selling a brand at a lifestyle first mh we allow our brand and lifestyle to follow behind on on the on the heels of the product the actual away suitcase is it's a totally fine suitcase but it's nothing at all special really it's it's essentially a white label suitcase out there from any suitcase manufacturer and they stuck a name played on it and got a bunch of models and and and well known people to say this is a brand right and that's not what we do we i i i totally respect that as one model of of doing business but we are a product company do you think of the weaknesses of doing that going that route because you guys chose not to go that route or it's it never appealed to you the weakness is of what we're doing or what what a way does yeah to be conscious of right let's say that she strengths with it but what are the weaknesses well i think i think it's rather i think that people are a bit f when it comes down to it i mean there is brand loyalty that exists and that is a real thing and and and it's a very important thing but if you don't actually create innovation i think that competition will eventually eat your lunch because they're gonna out you on the digital ads mh and when it becomes a race of who's willing to throw down the biggest checkbook and get the most play across the digital landscape i don't think that's territory that we certainly don't wanna be mh we'd rather be able to come in with clearly superior product not have to spend very much on marketing and let the product market itself right what do you guys i read a stats a couple years old now but i've read a stat that was twenty sixteen it said you guys had i think eighteen employees at the time i don't know how many do you guys have now called forty two forty two and it said hey the these guys are doing you know something like twenty three million in revenue on eighteen employees right they say a million dollars ahead in revenue a little bit more than that mh and i thought that was pretty remarkable and i i love that stat i always pay attention to the sort of the per capita mh earnings of a company and is that something you think about or did you sort of architect the business in a way to be sort of small footprint on the number of people it takes or or dollars it takes to build do you think about the sort of the revenue per head i your company only only retrospectively only like it's kind of a fun thing to look at after the fact yeah and and it remains true you know last year i think we had an average of thirty eight employees and we did somewhere between sixty five million and seventy million so we're almost at two million dollars in revenue per employee right and the business is you haven't raised money since then right we talked about the kickstarter so you guys have been bootstrap the whole way bootstrap the whole way yeah remarkable what keeps the overhead low and keeps it keeps it thin is that we don't we really don't want to hire new people we only do it when we're bursting at the seams mh and and there's all sorts of good reasons for doing that i think the the the most important is because we don't want our culture to experience any kind of shocks to the system right you know this is a a a family that's kind of grown up over time and we can add you know five to eight people per year at in infinite item without affecting our culture and and the larger we get the probably the more we can add but slowly that will allow it to to maintain itself and that's the most important thing like at the end of the day the point of peak design the point has never been about making money that is a result the point of peak design is for the employees of peak design to enjoy their lives that's why we exist so not even for the to make products that people love you're saying it's for makes making products that that people love and doing right by the customers are things that we enjoy doing mh but it is not the point like when i when i search myself that i did i quit my construction job to make other people happy i didn't i quit my construction job to make me happy right and hopefully that's the reason that everyone gets into business is that you think there's an opportunity for greater fulfillment in your life and happy is kind of a weird word you know i i do think the word like fulfillment is probably a better word a better word but it was somewhat controversial with within peak design to be very upfront and bra with that as like no the purpose of peak design is so that we can be happy people right and and there some of the people are like but that sounds so selfish and you can call it selfish if you want to me it is more honest honest than it is selfish yeah i joke about this a lot which is companies by law essentially depending on what type of company you are you're incorporated as your job is to maximize shareholder value mh it's the actual it's requirement of your of of your that's if we're were talking about mission that's the required mission for most companies they state that their mission is to make the customers happy they probably honestly are trying to do what you're doing yeah and then they'll sort of the the final you know lie or or hand wav that that happens is is then talking about making the world a better place you know just tack that on at the end and it's funny you say exactly what you're saying at at our company i told the team exactly this i said we're trying to build the company that we wanna work at u that's the whole thing that's the in order to do that we're gonna need to what is what type company we wanna be at we wanna make awesome products that we find in interesting and innovative and scratch our creative itch wanna get them to millions of people because that's fun and hearing their feedback it matters to us and we need to make money so that this whole operation can exist and we can have an awesome workplace with awesome people and hire the best talent mh and that's what this is about and it was a very foreign thing that i was telling them that seemed like the only logical thing to me and the time mh i certainly agree and i'm really proud of of us for are articulating it and and for the rest of the team ultimately being okay with you know us getting very public about that right i will tack on that that last part which you mentioned which i think frequently is hand waving well first off we became a public benefit corporation so yeah explain that what that is so people probably heard that but they don't maybe so basically instead of being we're a c corp and instead of being behold to maximize shareholder value at the risk of being sued by the shareholders which in the case of peak design is in a very big risk because i'm the only owner right but still from a a kind of an structural perspective a structural or a spiritual standpoint even like the we wanted to make sure that the point of peak design it has nothing to do with shareholder value and has everything to do with upholding our mission our mission and our purpose we we kinda we kind of delineate to do the purpose us to be happy the mission is six different points including build the best thing succeed at the expense of nobody offset our environmental impact use our voice to expire positive change put happiness over growth but the part about offsetting our environmental impact and then using our voice to inspire positive change is really what drove the thing i've been working probably the most on which is a new organization called climate neutral right and so just to explain the mechanics first so you said you're a c corp but your public benefit company which which means what what do what do you do if you're an entrepreneur who wants to do this how do you do that when you file with the secretary of state you have to make an election mh to be a pb public benefit corporation you can still be an s corp or c corp i i don't know if llc i i would imagine llc works as well within that but then it's just you know about your operating agreement and things like that and that allows you to not adhere to the maximize shareholder value as the core tenant are required that's right and instead you replace that with your you could replace it with know i don't know if it's actually whatever you want to my knowledge it is but i think it would stand the reason that it has to be some specific public benefit you exist for the broader shareholders which includes the public that we all live among gotcha correct and so you have your company that's peak design and now you have a new entity is that right it's a new entity it's a it's a not it's a five zero one c three it's a non nonprofit i'm the founder along with a guy named jonathan s who heads a company called bio the ceo of of climate neutral his name is austin whitman and there's about five people working for the org right now and so what are you trying to do with climate neutral climate neutral is an organization that owns a label called certified climate neutral and when you see certified climate neutral on a product it means that the brand is playing it has measured their entire carbon footprint all the way down to raw materials reduced what they reasonably can and then critically offset the rest mh and it is all about the the fact that the conversation about climate change is what it is and businesses sit there and continue to ring their hands and say oh we we hope that by twenty fifty we will have reduced our footprint or like we're gonna straight line our reductions between now and twenty fifty without actually taking any concrete action is absolutely ab important to me especially when i understood finally what peak designs carbon footprint was and then how much it cost to eradicate and how how how'd you do that how'd did you figure out what you're i hired a consultancy for forty thousand dollars which was a lot of money and i wasn't too happy about having to pay that that led to part of climate neutral which is the fact that we'll measure your footprint for free with a tool that we're developing along with some of the world's best carbon lc experts so we've handled that part of it right and then the other thing is that what'd did you learn so they you pay forty grand they did it an analysis and what they give you back what were you surprised to learn well at the ten thousand dollar mark they done what's called the they'd used a tool called the scope three evaluator and they ask you how many dollars did you spend on metals how much on plastics how much on air shipping how much on c shipping etcetera and they said okay your footprint is about sixteen thousand seven hundred tons plus or minus twenty percent and this is at the ten thousand dollar mark in the contract and and i was like okay well what do we do now was like well now we're gonna do the the the deep dive analysis we're gonna knock on the doors of your entire supply chain and get their energy bills and find out their proportion amount is just like oh wow that's gonna take up the rest of the year right and that's gonna cost an additional thirty grand i see why it is like that's an insane amount of work i was like can we just go round up yeah that twenty percent and call it good and they're like what do you mean call it good well we wanna offset at all and did you think okay sixteen thousand plus my twenty percent is that horrible like i wouldn't need no no idea i don't know how to interpret that i no idea but i i did know this i i i had asked them well what's the how much does it cost to offset a ton of carbon and the average price to offset a ton of carbon these are verified offsets by a third party auditing agency that doesn't mean they're absolutely perfect each individual offset subject to a margin bear a certain amount of risk but taken as a whole this is an audited group of carbon offsets and and and and you have to look at it as a looking at the whole the average price for an sells three bucks a ton so you take sixteen thousand seven hundred you round up by twenty eight percent twenty thousand tons of carbon and this is on about thirty million dollars worth of business that's what we did in twenty seventeen so sixty grand sixty thousand dollars right thirty grand for the report yeah because cover half of the footprint yes yeah and like i was pulling my hair out with like wait a second wait a second there's all sorts of things about this are just luna first off the cost or the the notion that that doing something which gets you know to a closer level of precision than twenty plus or minus twenty percent that's the total waste of effort right secondly you're telling me that as a company that makes shit in vietnam and china and ships it all over the world say we grand you can offer sixty thousand dollars yeah we're gonna do that and also how come everyone isn't doing this right and they just kinda threw up their shoulders and said yeah that's what we say and i was like well how come i haven't heard from you guys telling me that i would have this opportunity and the you know i i don't really know the answer but you started to come up with a solution yeah yeah i mean like it was just so disco it didn't make sense i'm hearing on one side climate change intra issue we don't know what to do about and then here's this this situation where if everybody did it if everybody bought verified carbon offsets for their business climate change goes away what actually is a carbon option what am i doing i pay the money what happened you pay the money and of course what i've just described there is a hypothetical scenario i'm sure that there are people who are heard that go n yeah there aren't enough course don't email the world you're gonna do that right there aren't enough carbon offsets in the world and that is accurate there aren't right now but if you show a market based solution that demonstrates demand the carbon offsets and there's a revenue stream form so that a for profit carbon reducing business can exist you better goddamn believe that those carbon offsets are gonna get produced right and so what it is you you can take any technology which s carbon or prevents carbon from getting there in the first place so peak design bought a whole bunch of landfill gas offsets what is that well there's a landfill in south carolina that is filled up there's no municipal law which says okay landfill you have to now cap that landfill and trap those gases and flare because land landfills will sit there and the leach methane mh until they're dundee d composing for a long time and so basically peak design said well if that's not gonna happen we'll make that happen we will pay for an hd tarp and a bunch of dirt to get pushed out of that and you collect the methane and turn that into electricity so that's what a carbon offset we have nothing to do with that landfill in south carolina however there was an a greenhouse gas reducing opportunity for us and we snapped it up love it and there's had to find that yourself no no there's i mean there are there are frankly so many organizations involved in the in the retailing of carbon offsets and i think that's great it has a it has the foundations of the time type of market solution that we desperately need right we just need a hell of a lot more demand right so your your plan is get the demand up that's right and then either you make the marketplace or someone will make the marketplace with the demand and the supply it's already there it's not like we need to recreate something we just need more of it right yeah and the other other i think it's important to note other types of offsets that exist out there you can buy farmland that is follow and and and plant a forest there and and so long as you've got the sur of that forest that is a carbon store right like an un questionable trees or made out of carbon you're sucking it out of the air and you're putting it there and and you have then you have to protect that force and that is a carbon offset you can pay a farmer to switch from traditional row agriculture to to no tail agriculture cost the farmer a little bit more you pay in that difference and then the root structure within those fields ends up drawing down a ton of carbon peak design planted a bunch of sea grass in puerto rico after hurricane maria came through like there there are there are all sorts of opportunities and it's a big world out there right there's plenty that this earth can absorb the carbon it just costs money right and it it seems like it feels good to know also where that money's is going like the fact that you guys did the sea grass after the hurricane or whatever that's much better than say we bought a bunch of credits right so we're good now right right it feels very different it it it does feel very different and that information i think is always achievable and you should always know what you're buying and and what you're going to support but i i'm i am excited for the day when peak design and the eighty companies that we've gotten to sign up along with us right now and including your neighbor's all birds right over there i am excited for the day when we are not the exception we are the norm right and i'm excited for the day when a consumer picks up a bottle looks for the climate neutral label and doesn't see it and says puts it down well i'm not gonna buy this right these assholes don't pay for their carbon right so that's the dream scenario and you know it's it's it's so vastly different than peak design and i don't know it's it's it's far far less predictable for me sure i don't know if it's gonna take off but man we've gotten some serious traction so far and people seem to be resonating with the idea yeah i i'm excited when you tell me about it that i'm not the most environmentally conscious person by nature it's not like i'm already up that alley or sort of need to deep and knowing about this stuff but when you tell me that that just makes sense to me appeals to my senses as a business person it appeals to my senses as a human being and i'm pretty bullish on that yeah i'm not just saying that to blow smoke i was gonna ask you about peak design mh you guys do the innovation on the product what happens is do people just knock you off and just start copying your designs and your innovations because i would imagine that that's a problem right yeah we just launched a tripod on kickstarter this last year and it is awesome it is like tripod industry has not been shaken up in decades and we just blew it wide open and what's it called how do i it's called travel tripod tony by peak design and and basically what we did is instead of having cylindrical legs that are incapable of collapsing unto themselves we made legs that were shaped were like a like a pie wedge and so they they fit around this triangular center column so everything nests really beautifully the idea for this came also in two thousand eight on that walk about i was in the india i was in da sealing india sitting there with my tripod and i drew this sketch of these pie wedges that would collapse around at that time in my sketch was a cylindrical center column still i don't know nobody made that you know and we sat on that idea for a long time and took four years to produce it in and in part the reason is because it's really hard to make this you know a hundred and seventy two moving interfaces with that three hundred sixty individual parts it's complex so how are you guys making these you're designing them in house you have a a partner who how the manufacturing partner in china is i mean the the prototyping and development of these things is is a collaboration between our our manufacturer and our three d printing and our our tools and our own shop here and how often i guess early on or maybe now but how often were you going to china to visit that partner because i've been on the other side of alibaba and it's tough to get a product made something i get a sense of are they understanding the vision here how do i we communicate this effectively how did you do that spend a lot of time over there not me personally as much as my my engineering team on this one i've i've just my role has become more bona ceo than design engineer yeah but they spend a lot of time over there there's a lot of calls almost you know it's sometimes it's every night calls with china to communicate the today's needs and things like that but most importantly we have a a very trusting relationship with our manufacturer they were as tiny as us when they started and we have just grown in locks step with one another and that's been the case with our vietnamese supply chain and with our chinese supply chain so we're not going in there to some big ass company it doesn't really care about your business that much now this has been like a true partnership from from the ground up and like i say you we were very small so anyone who's listening who who's like well i don't have that right now it's true you probably don't have it that out out the start but neither did you neither did we and we built a foundation of trust and respect and genuine care for each other's needs like and so let's rewind so early on before you have that partner mh talk about how you found them and how long that took and any of the pitfalls you you the traps you best up on with our current setup there was actually a guy who called us up in twenty thirteen his name is pat song he lives in portland and he's become a dear friend and yeah actually he he serves as kind of a a liaison between he sort of finds the factories and owns that that partnership and he's been he's been wonderful in going out there and helping us source these things mh his name his company's name is alliance trading group and they're wonderful to work with and you know as a they've grown i think that they're it it's just been cool it's another partner that's grown up alongside of us but even if it worked for that we had started with wu great machining to do are which we found on m f g dot com right and and s i remember they were in in n china and that was alibaba right you know and and so if you're somebody today who's looking to you know find a manufacturing partner mh what would you tell them kinda bull points or any any mistakes you made that now in in retrospect you realize you would have done differently or you learning you had actually i i it's not really mistakes as much but there there is something that's that's very nerve racking about working with you know people who speak a different language and the communication isn't perfect but i would just remember that the most likely scenario is that the other person on the other side of that email is a good person who wants to develop a strong business and their intentions are correct and so i think it's entirely worthwhile to extend more trust than your than your your inclination might suggest that's that that's been my experience i i get i think it was aided by the fact that we were pretty successful right out of the chute you know a manufacturer is gonna wanna pay attention if they believe in your idea and if they believe in you believe it or not like you can go over there and you can ex exclude the charisma and the confidence that trans you know that absolutely transcribe transcribed languages and they will believe in you and they'll work harder for you as a did you do that early on oh hell yeah yeah absolutely you know did go to the canton on fair no i didn't actually go to the canton on fair and i i never have been a couple of my employees just went but no literally exchanging emails with people and and eventually saying like okay we're gonna come and go and see our tooling will you pick us up at the airport and sure mister peter let's do it okay great and so if you're we should wrap so if you're listening to this and you're like peter sounds great peak design sounds great climate neutral sounds great where do they go to get more of either your thoughts find out about the product shout out some places where people can connect with you beyond the podcast and get a get a hold of you sure the peak design website is great i'd recommend peeking into the journal that's kinda where i i do write a lot of my my sort of bigger thought pieces you're interested in my philosophy switch you might not if you've reached the end of the podcast yeah probably are honestly that's right that's right you know hilariously i have like nine twitter followers i think i just never ramp that up i think i've got an instagram account that i get too bash full about it i actually ridiculously i think that very few people are having a new year's resolution that says you know i really wanna bone up my social media presence but there is a part of me that's like you know what i i do kinda wanna it do it because i do love taking photographer or taking pictures and and creating videos and i don't share them with the world and i'm i'm conflicted about whether i actually wanna do that or not but sorry that was a long response just go to peak design go to find a neutral that i hopefully google will take you there nice sorry alright peter thanks for coming on i really appreciate that and i'd i dig the story i i was interested in the product the product design part but the climate neutral part for me kinda stole the show here so right on here happy to hear that too great