7:16 p.m. on May 21, 2010 (EDT)
C4B7 -
To name just a few:
Gerry, Holubar, Kelty (yeah, there are still packs made under the "Kelty"name, but ...), Dana Designs, Eddie Bauer, The North Face (they might be coming back), Frostline, Rivendell, Trailwise, Snowlion, Early Winters, ....
I could also add REI, since the present REI, now a yuppie clothing store, is so much different than the REI of even 20 years ago, or EMS, or Sport Chalet - these have the same names (as does Eddie Bauer), but their product line is so much different that they really are not the same companies they were. REI and EMS do not carry anywhere as broad a line of outdoor gear as they did 20 or 30 years ago. The climbing gear, for example, is far sparser, even in stores close to the major climbing areas. For the last two winters, REI has not carried telemark or randonee ski gear, or even in most of their stores, XC ski gear, with the selection of snowshoe gear very poor. Wannabe clothing sells well - the actual gear does not.
Johnson Worldwide, which has changed its name a number of times, was very much an outdoorsman's manufacturer and supplier, but now is more of a "car camper" and "RV-er" orientation.The founder (SC Johnson of Johnson Wax fame) started JWA by acquiring outdoor-oriented companies making products for the outdoor activities he was interested in. But somehow, the corporate management got away with itself. They did not want to let loose of the Silva name, for example, though Silva (Sweden), maker of the JWA compasses for decades, wanted to go on their own in North America. The companies broke off relations, with the JWA "Silva" compasses now being made in SE Asia and of noticeably poorer quality (the real Silva Sweden compasses remain very high quality).
It isn't so much that the companies became public companies, as being taken over by conglomerates. North Face is a good example - Under the founders (a group who had worked at the Berkeley Ski Hut), they produced top quality gear, well-suited to backpacking, climbing, and backcountry skiing. If you read the founder's book (some 25-30 years ago), you will find a realy excellent outdoor philosophy and way of running the company. Then TNF started acquiring other companies, including Sierra Designs (SD employees took their company back, though they are going the same route now). That proved problematic, so they became part of VF (which was originally the Vanity Fair lingerie and women's undergarment company, but became a huge conglomerate with many unrelated companies under their umbrella). To cut production costs, a lot of the work went overseas, with poor quality control. They did keep a line of high quality, well-designed gear, but the name was on a lot of inferior clothing.
Atlas Snowshoes was started by a grad student who did his graduate project under my next-door neighbor, an engineering professor at Stanford. Atlas was a huge leap ahead in snowshoe design. But Perry, being the brilliant innovator he is, got more interested in other things. So he sold the company to Tubbs, which became part of a large conglomerate, and the quality of both Atlas and Tubbs snowshoes is much lower than it was even 5 years ago.
I wonder how many people are aware that Abercrombie and Fitch, founded in 1892, was the top American outfitter for sporting goods for high adventure until the 1960s (customers included Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Shackleton, and a number of early American climbing and polar expeditions). A&F of today bears virtually no resemblance to the original company.
The problem stems from the way public company boards and executives, and big conglomerates in particular view things. They are in business to make money, which means high salaries for the executive suite and payments to the board members, plus hopefully growth in stock valuations and maybe dividends for the stockholders (though dividends are not in style these days). This means cutting costs on the one hand, and boosting profits on the other, through raising prices if necessary. As far as the outdoor industry is concerned, most of the board members and executive suite are not outdoor types. So they do not see quality as an important factor (there are exceptions, of course - Chouinard is one of those exceptions, but Black Diamond has not been one of his companies since the liability suits of the 1970s and 1980s).
Cutting costs and raising profits are not bad in and of themselves, in my view, and can in fact be very desirable. But quality is important as well. For one thing, it builds customer loyalty and repeat sales. If you are a company exec and not a user of the product, then you aren't going to be as aware of what quality in climbing gear, a ski, a backpack really consists of. I think of a certain sock manufacturer who invited me into their booth at the ORShow to see that year's product "improvements" - which were "new colors" - give me a break! Who cares about the color of the socks when they are down inside the boots where no one can see them? Hey, we are missing the women's market! So let's make "women-specific" packs by making the fabric in pastel colors, especially pink, with flowery images all over them!
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