Re: Stephensons?

Scruggs-there are a lot of the small companies online-some have come and gone or been bought out, and some deserve to be gone because of bad customer service-taking orders and not delivering products. A few I can remember offhand in no particular order-
Hennessey (hammocks)
Tarptent (Henry Shires-great service and products from what I read)
Titanium Goat (teepee tents and UL stoves and such)
AntiGravity Gear -cooking stuff mostly
ULA-packs
There are a bunch more I can't think of at the moment. I mentioned a few others in a previous post above. Sometimes its hard to tell how small a company is-some of them look small but are subsidiaries of larger companies. GoLite was bought by Timerland, the shoe company, fairly recently (within the last year, I believe).

Most of the little companies I've seen make UL gear or climbing gear. If you visit sites such as backpackinglight.com, backpacking.net, or whiteblaze.com, you can find UL gear in their gear stores,threads in their forums with lists of small gear makers, and questions and reviews of various products from the smaller companies.

You may be able to do the same on the climbing oriented websites. Some of the online stores like backcountrygear.com carry some gear from smaller companies as well.