Part 2: The Trekker Years
“So, what do you think of this mousetrap?” Bruno questioned during a visit to my bachelor pad in downtown Boulder. He and his older brother, John, had cobbled together a crude device for climbing uphill in traditional alpine ski bindings. It was an adult riff on a Swiss contraption called Secura-fix, designed mainly for children, which the brothers spotted while off-piste skiing the year before around St. Anton, Austria. Bruno and John’s version was intended to be more adjustable, more durable, and jet black instead of Playskool pink.
Since our spring meetup on the Ark and our encounter at the Rock Bottom, Bruno and I had grown our relationship to the point that he felt comfortable showing me the proto. During our 20 days kayaking in the Grand Canyon earlier that fall, I had marveled at his and John’s ingenuity, and he had marveled at my enthusiasm: I was always the last one off the river and usually among the “final four” on late nights around the campfire. Now he wanted my opinion on the product, and it seemed he might be sizing me up as a potential business partner.
“Alpine skiing in the backcountry will never take off in this country,” I remember declaring. “The terrain is too mellow. That’s why everyone’s using telemark gear.” Ha, didn’t somebody also once say the automobile would never replace the horse and buggy—and nobody would ever need a personal computer? I was clearly a jaded Luddite. And yes, I was a telemarker.
We had breakfast a month or two later at the Walnut Café in Boulder, a morning we both remember as BCA’s official date of conception. “I’m going to have to go home and do a little research,” I hedged. “I just don’t think there’s a market here for this thing.” Bruno came back at me with a challenge I couldn’t refuse: “You’re right, there is no market. Your job would be to create that market.” What the heck, I was basically unemployable, having bailed on my fledgling career to pursue exotic writing assignments. And I was done flailing around in leather boots and tele bindings, so why not try something different? I accepted and we shook hands. Oh yeah, he needed me to find $30,000 to start cutting the plastic injection mold over at Alfred Manufacturing.
I’m not quite sure what made Bruno think I could create a market for something like this. I did have both an engineering and a marketing degree. But those weren’t nearly as valuable as my connections in the ski industry, thanks to a solid run of freelance writing projects I’d scored over the last couple of years. This included a few life-changing assignments with Powder magazine and Over the Edge (a fledgling sister publication of Larry Flynt’s porn bible, Hustler). In these two assignments, was imbedded as a forerunner in the emerging “extreme skiing” circuit, skiing way over my head in places like Crested Butte, Valdez, Chamonix, and Las Leñas with unknown young guns by the name of McConkey, Kreitler, Cummings, and Coombs. At the time, of course, I had no idea this emerging subculture would change the course of skiing forever. Extreme skiers (now called freeriders) like these guys would play a huge part in our success. Just as important, though, I had relationships with the print media—and back then product reviews in print mags were money.
About raising money for the mold, it turned out to be a big ask. Despite a 25-page business plan that projected an ambitious 50,000 units sold in Year 10, we had no takers for equity financing—except Bruno’s family, whom we bought out a few years later. I got a loan from my parents. We financed working capital expenses with seven different “introductory-rate” credit cards.
Alpine Trekker production got off to a rough start, but the bar was low, and the final product was a lot better than Secura-fix, whose New York-based distributor was a legendary stiff that retailers couldn’t wait to leave behind. The first year we operated out of Bruno’s garage on W. Moorhead Circle in South Boulder. While the plastic parts came out of the injection mold in Denver, we did all the wire forming in the garage--and the heat treating in Bruno and Val’s oven. We paid friends in pizza and Old Milwaukee to come over and do assembly. Christmas week 1994, when our retailers were supposed to have been fully stocked, we broke all our pre-production samples on a last-minute field-testing mission at Eldora. Back to the drawing board. Despite the hiccups, we sold a few hundred pairs that year. We had our foot in the door.