NEMO stakes claim to outdoor gear innovation
Firm’s ideas aim to ‘improve your adventure’
When Cam Brensinger graduated from Vermont’s Middlebury College in 1998, his only plan was to head for Alaska’s Mount McKinley with three college buddies to do some rock climbing.
Always an outdoor enthusiast, Brensinger had studied creative writing, physics and studio art. He had given little thought to how he would turn his college experience into a productive career.
“When I got home and realized I wouldn’t have a roof over my head any more, I set out to make a business plan to start an outdoor gear company,” Brensinger said.
Today, he is CEO of NEMO Equipment, the Dover, New Hampshire, company he wound up founding in 2002.
RISD and MIT led to NEMO
His father, a successful architect who had run a firm for many years, took one look at Brensinger’s initial plan and advised him to go back to school for industrial design. Brensinger describes the advice as triggering one of those “incredibly lucky moments in life when you realize what you’re going to do the rest of your life.”
He spent the next couple of months putting together a portfolio to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the top industrial design schools in the country, and was admitted.
At RISD, Brensinger fell in with a design team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was working on the next generation of spacesuits for NASA.
“I was in art school, employed by MIT, exposed to both some great design talent and incredible brains of MIT,” Brensinger said. “That was the backdrop for starting NEMO.”
Brensinger’s senior thesis incorporated a much better business plan for his outdoor equipment company. Coming out of RISD as a newly minted industrial designer, Brensinger had a small award from the school and about $7,500 in savings to launch it.
“I thought I would be profitable in six months, so I’ve learned a lot about running a business,” Brensinger said.
How Airbeam brand was born
Brensinger, now 42, supported himself through consulting while developing NEMO’s first product – a low-pres- sure, air-supported tent, which he dubbed an Airbeam tent.
“That’s a glorified way of saying inflatable,” Brensinger joked. “We liked the term Airbeam instead of calling the tents inflatable, because that invokes cheap products. Think of pool toys.”
From 2002 to 2004, Brensinger was “holed up” in his first office in an old mill space in Nashua, New Hampshire, learning how to sew and pattern. By summer 2004, he was ready to debut a prototype Airbeam tent at the Outdoor Retailer Trade Show in Salt Lake City.
The reception was overwhelming. As a result of the Salt Lake City show, Brensinger received an invitation from ISPO, the world’s largest outdoor gear show in Germany, to submit his Airbeam tent to the annual innovation competition. He won.
“That was a godsend for us; it put us on the map,” Brensinger said. “We end- ed up getting listed among the 100 best inventions by Time magazine and Popular Science. We were on ‘Good Morning America’ and the Discovery Channel.”
The mainstream press helped NEMO get credit for its “unique ideas,” Brensinger said, but what he really needed was recognition from industry sources such as Backpacker and Outside magazines. He got that, too.
From tents to sleeping pads to outdoor furniture
Brensinger began selling his inflatable tents in earnest in 2006, going through a couple of rounds of outside investment to fund production. Today, NEMO has only one outside equity investor and is majority family-owned.
In 2008, NEMO launched sleeping pads. The next natural step, Brensinger says, was sleeping bags, launched in 2013, and then outdoor furniture in 2017. None is like what already was out there.
The sleeping pad, for example, was the first to have two separate air layers. The reason for that was the “classic conundrum” associated with sleeping pads: inflate them too little and you feel the pebbles and roots beneath you; inflate them too much and it’s like sleeping on a rock.
“With two separate layers, you inflate the bottom layer to protect from bumps and adjust the top layer to be as squishy as you like,” Brensinger said. “To be honest, that’s a good representation of the kind of problem-solving we have to do in general.”
The only way NEMO was going to survive in a competitive outdoor gear market was with its ideas, he said.
“We won’t bring anything to market that’s the same; everything we make has to improve your adventure,” Brensinger said. The company has nearly 100 issued or pending patents.
Outdoor gear: Design and engineering vs. marketing
NEMO has a workforce of 27 people with a wide range of backgrounds. Head engineer Pat McCluskey has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Harvard and worked for General Electric before joining NEMO.
“We’re like a design and engineering firm with a brand at this point,” Brensinger said. “Sadly, so many of the iconic brands in the industry have become marketing and distribution companies versus design and engineering companies.” Such firms, he said, “have stopped taking risks like a smaller company like us does.”
Brensinger declined to name names. He also declined to reveal annual revenue for privately held NEMO, but said the company will grow by 30 percent this year.
Brensinger doesn’t have a grand plan for NEMO’s growth, and he certainly doesn’t have an exit strategy. He doesn’t aspire to follow in the footsteps of North Face or even Patagonia, whose founder and owner, Yvon Chouinard, made it onto Forbes’ list of billionaires last year.
“I wanted to make stuff because I love making things, gear I was proud of,” Brensinger said. “I wanted my life to be an adventure. I wanted going to work to feel as much like going rock climbing with my buddies as it could.
“As long as it continues to feel that way, I’ll let it grow and evolve however it wants to grow and evolve.”
Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.