Part 5: The Full Offering
The business plan we wrote up in Bruno’s condo in the summer of ’94 clearly spelled out that the Trekker would be surrounded by other product offerings over the next decade. While our projection of 50,000 Trekkers sold in Year 10 might have been a little dreamy, we were already ahead of schedule with the overwhelming success of Tracker DTS. And it helped that backcountry skiing was gaining a huge tailwind, fanned in part by the Alpine Trekker and the Fritschi Diamir.
The leading alpine touring bindings at the time, Silveretta and Ramer, were sketchy rattletraps eschewed by aggressive alpine skiers wanting to push into the backcountry. For that crowd who didn’t trust either A.T. or telemark gear, our Alpine Trekker served as a gateway drug into the backcountry. Our company slogan, “High-performance backcountry skiing,” was hitting the mark in the burgeoning freeride scene.
All of BCA’s products were basically conceived out of frustration with existing products. Every day we spent in the backcountry was an exercise in studying the weaknesses of the gear currently on the market. Like the Alpine Trekker and Tracker DTS, we were out to improve on products that were already out there but were off the mark for the typical recreationist. Part of our secret was that we were coming from a relatively “immature” market in North America, where backcountry skiing was just taking off–versus Europe, where it had already been a way of life for decades. Gear at the time was mainly being developed in Europe and targeted at professionals, not recreationists. Cases in point: Transceivers were difficult to use if you didn’t train with them every day. A.T. bindings were designed for ski traverses and climbing approaches, not for cliff hucking and powder chasing.
The next category we attacked was shovels and probes, the other two-thirds of the snow safety “trifecta.” The best-selling shovels at the time were lightweight European versions with brightly colored polycarbonate or Lexan blades. These were known to break in real avalanche debris. An American company (name withheld) made aluminum blades, but in real-life conditions, those would often break at the shaft/blade interface (and they’d break even more when we stomped on them in public). With the help of consulting engineers Neil Beidleman and Mike Pennings, BCA came out with a new line of shovels with aluminum blades only–and shafts that were oval instead of round, to prevent breakage at the shaft/blade interface.
Named our Companion System, the shovels came with a collapsible 1.8-meter probe integrated into the shaft. We came up with this name to counteract the current fixation by European manufacturers on designing products for professional use, particularly search-and-rescue (SAR) groups. Our Companion System was designed, we emphasized, for companion rescue: for making live recoveries versus the body recoveries primarily made by SAR groups using heavy and unwieldy three-meter probes. Since live recoveries were basically unheard of at burial depths greater than 1.5 meters, our stance was that 1.8 meters was more than enough. Yet another controversy was born: Between these claims and our still-festering comments about professionals when launching the Tracker DTS, BCA was now entrenched as the brand for recreationists, not pros.
The Companion System eventually morphed into our Bomber and Dozer shovel series, and we expanded our probe line to longer models for both recreationists and pros. In the meantime, we managed to pioneer another new category: freezeproof winter hydration. Like most of our other products, this was born from frustration with existing products. As mountain bikers–after kayak season, of course–we’d gotten accustomed to using Camelbaks to hydrate when riding in our semi-arid Colorado environment. Why not use these in the winter instead of having to stop and break out your old Nalgene bottle? Because the bite valve and hydration tube would freeze. Bruno came up with the idea of “stashing” the hose and bite valve inside a super-insulated shoulder strap, where body heat from your armpits would become trapped and prevent freezing. It worked and the packs sold well—at least in the U.S., where Camelbak was well-accepted. To this date, hydration isn’t nearly as well-accepted in Europe as it is in North America. Nonetheless, our Stash packs gave us a foothold in the technical pack market, where we would soon make the next big breakthrough since Tracker DTS: avalanche airbags.
BCA has always held one distinct advantage over our European competitors: since the market is nearly three times bigger there than it is here, the Euros focus on their home turf. They don’t see trends in North America until it’s too late: like snowmobiling and freeriding. Even though avalanche airbags had been around in Europe since the early ‘80s, it wasn’t until snowmobilers started using them in North America in the next millennium that the category started taking off. With the explosion in high-performance mountain sleds at around this time, unfortunately, sledders were getting buried and killed in unprecedented numbers. The demand for transceivers, shovels, probes, and education increased proportionally. Since snowmobilers care less about weight and cost than most skiers, they were now starting to buy airbags, usually from small-scale U.S. and Canadian distributors of the ABS System, the first manufacturer of avalanche airbags, based outside Munich, Germany.
Rather than importing ABS packs and silk screening our brand name on them, like other companies were starting to do, we made the leap to develop our own system. The goal was to make airbags lighter, more affordable, and easier to recharge than the cumbersome ABS design, which required sending your spent high-pressure nitrogen cartridges—and explosive pyrotechnic triggers—back to get recharged at a sketchy warehouse in the Midwest that seemed to change locations on an annual basis. Most of the time they never came back.
Our first airbag prototype was developed by BCA’s secret weapon: Dwayne Paynton, the former Safety Director for the BC Snowmobiling Federation, and a highly-skilled tradesman based in rural Winlaw, B.C. BCA had hired Dwayne and his wife, Deb, ten years earlier to take care of all BCA sales in the North American snowmobiling market—and all BCA product distribution in Canada. With a 3,000-psi paintball cylinder, a 5-mil garbage bag, an old bicycle braking mechanism, and a venturi poached from the homemade tire refill system in his barn, Dwayne was able to prove that we could develop a user-friendly system with a much simpler design than the over-engineered, pyrotechnic ABS System. This was a project that I would champion and that would lead to a complete reconfiguration of BCA.
We expanded our facility, hired a mechanical engineering staff, outsourced consultants, and took our financing burden to an entirely new level. While this eventually rocketed BCA to industry leadership, it was taxing on our cash flow and company vibe. The long lead times and sky-high costs for components were too much for our bankers: they would only loan us money once we had inventory in stock. In the past, Bruno and I could bridge the gap by securing the shortfall with the equity we had in our homes. But that was no longer enough. The stress came to a breaking point. We started looking for buyers.