Hey everyone, this is Aaron Schwarz, one of the founders of Arita. We build AI segmentation for a bunch of brands. We are not talking about Arita today. We're talking to Peter Dering, founder of Peak Design, who I first met a dozen years ago on a panel for Kickstarter, where people were asking us both questions because I had run a 50K Kickstarter. And after about 10 minutes, I said, I'm stopping. Because Peter at that point had done, I don't know, millions of dollars on Kickstarter and was like the godfather of it. And happened to bump into him a couple months ago and it was very delightful for me because such a great operator and I sweet-talked him into joining. So Peter, thank you for joining me today.
Happy to be a sucker anytime, man. Good to see you, Aaron.
You too, man. I want to start with giving you the microphone to share a little bit about yourself, your background, and like how did Peak really get going?
Yeah. Okay. Right on. Well, let's see here. Peak got going when I was... it's hard to pinpoint the precise origin, but I think we'll call it here. I came out to school from Wisconsin to California and fell in love with California and I was working as a construction engineer. The job was hard. It was long. And I think that there was a trip that I took two years in, a leave of absence. I traveled the world and I thought, 'Wow, it is nice to not have a boss. It is so nice to set your own schedule.' And I think I became kind of consumed with the idea of being an entrepreneur at that point in time. It'd be two years though before that desire to just be my own boss manifested. And I kind of got quite lucky because I was pursuing really nutty ideas like floating solar panels and a regenerative brake mechanism for electrified trains. Things that just frankly wouldn't have worked. But then I was fortunate to run into this problem that I'd had before while on my travels, which is cameras are a pain in the ass to carry. And the neck strap sucks. It's banging against your stomach, especially when you're moving along. And so I had this idea that I had kind of come up with on the road to carry a camera on a backpack strap. That ended up being the idea that I pursued when I quit that construction job. I just dove in head first. I had about $20,000 in savings from my first four years and I incorporated and I said I'm going to make a company out of this and 15 months later I launched a Kickstarter and hell I guess the rest is history, huh?
Did were you on the sidelines for the 15 months building or was it like you had your job and you were building and if the Kickstarter went well or was it like hey I'm burning the boats this is going to be a business?
I burned the boats and I did run out of money and I started working restaurant jobs to make ends meet just about 30 hours a week during kind of September to December or October to December of 2010. I also found out that I was going to become a father quite unexpectedly during that period of time. So the stakes really ramped up in a very quick way. Call it October 2nd, 2010. That was not the day my daughter was born by the way. That was the day I found out that there's a bun in the oven.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, congrats. That's incredible.
It's funny, the timelines very much match. I started my brand truly on a lark. I didn't have the passion to start the brand. I had a passion to start a business and try it out. I think in April of 2010 and then really launched for real in July, August and then kind of went down that path. For me, Kickstarter, I think we did it in late 2013, maybe early 2014. You were on the train from the beginning. Did you know that that was going to be a strategy? Like, what got you into that approach from the start?
It's such incredible dumb luck. My go-to market strategy, not a term I was aware of, by the way, was I was going to go door to door and sell this thing in camera stores. And I did this road trip in December maybe yeah December of 2010 and I had a prototype and I took it on a little road show and I was planning on that being my go-to market strategy and you know certainly form a website but I knew nothing about marketing nothing about like it just there was no plan. And in January of that year a couple of friends told me kind of within the space of the same week about Kickstarter and the marriage of timing could not have been more perfect. I mean, it was so damn lucky. And so, I probably among the strokes of luck that it takes to really have a successful business because there's tons of smart people out there who are ambitious and willing to work hard. In my case, and I'm not alone here, like that was my great stroke of luck. The emergence of Kickstarter right at the time when I was doing this product that would be perfect for Kickstarter.
Yeah. My sense is it like look the money was important obviously but my sense is also there's some level of community or feedback or something that is why you're still continuing to go down that path. Is that a good assumption or kind of what else did it unlock besides just having the money to run the business?
It absolutely unlocked a community element, a direct voice to customers back and forth. We have a point in our mission that's treat your customer as peers and that certainly emanated from the Kickstarter. The really direct interaction that I felt. I mean, there were 5,268 backers and every single one of them who wrote into the company, I was the respondent on. I was on the comment board just religiously answering in great detail, cutting quick videos that look absolutely insane if you look back at them now to explain features or why I did certain things. And the community of Kickstarter was at that time and remains a place where really passionate people about being first movers on things tend to show up and they will become incredible ambassadors for your brand. I don't know what these people did previously to scratch that itch of they want to be in on the ground floor. I guess it's like fan clubs. If you go back to the days before, it really does strike me as like a fan club. We've got all these incredible tools now for this sort of one-on-one collaboration or communication, but at the time that was just the and still to this day really is a number one for us.
And I'm sure you talked to a lot of early stage brand founders or aspiring people who are like, 'Hey, I've got a product. I've got an idea. I want to do it.' Do you actually recommend going down that path or has the world changed enough and how people are consuming changed enough where it's like hey look the objective is still to build community, build ambassadors, use your word, but there are different paths. How do you think about navigating today versus again 15 years ago?
I think that I really am when I advise people one way or the other there's a lot more knowledge and understanding about kind of product market fit and what is going to succeed there and what isn't. We've got a better sense of what that is now. Like Kickstarter is a geeky audience. And so if your product is going to appeal to a geeky demographic, it's a great place to get started. We've learned a lot more in later years about other ways of doing e-commerce. And I think there are so many different platforms. I mean, Peak Design doesn't even at this moment have a TikTok shop but I would think that something like that might even depending on what your idea is rival Kickstarter as a go-to market strategy. I can't say that factually but I think that there just are a lot of different ways now of approaching it.
One of the things when you were giving the backstory and you listed out two different ideas, right? And one was like solar panels, one was regenerative braking. I think you mentioned it's very clear that being a good environmental steward, thinking about sustainability is obviously core to you. I know it obviously is core to Peak. I'm a customer. I'm also friends with your head of environmental impact and sustainability. How was this from day one? Was this just a passion of yours? I want to go beyond just the story and talk about how do brands do this well? How do you think about it? How do you be a good steward as a brand owner?
Let's go back to my college days for a second and my senior capstone course. I was a construction engineer, civil engineer and it was really the first time I learned in depth about green building and what would emerge into the LEED being a LEED accredited professional. So the concept of sustainability, this is 2005, became a central focus for me. I read all kinds of books about it. I became obsessed with the potential of ethanol. There's a book I read called Sustainability Without the Hot Air. It took every kind of known renewable technology and put it in these units of replacement for the fossil fuel infrastructure that we had. And I just gobbled all that stuff up. So I had a pretty intense focus in energy and specifically renewable energy but energy in general and its fungibility. I've always thought this is an incredible thing that arrives via the sun on this planet and gets transformed into all these different formats which we can then intelligently harvest. I really wanted my career to be there. That's why you see regenerative brake mechanism for trains, not bikes, floating solar. I was constantly thinking about geothermal. Let's just find the right volcano that we can drill into on the side and get that magma pipe going and have unlimited. Now Fervo is doing that. It's kind of funny. All of these ideas that I had are now being commercialized in one format or another. So it's kind of cool to see that, but it's also I'm glad I didn't pursue those things because, you know, 16 years later, they're basically just barely reaching some version of commercialization. I admire it deeply, but no, I got waylaid into this other passion which was photography and kind of mechanical invention.
And then you know what I would wake up and realize one day is like I'm running a consumer brand. I'm a retailer. Holy shit, what do I do with that? That is not I thought I was an engineer, an inventor, and an environmentalist, but no, I'm a retailer. That's crazy. But suffice it to say, I actually did not think of a way to fuse having this retail brand and environmental initiatives. And that was that friend of yours, Annie Nyborg, who brought that into the company. She joined us in 2014. And she'd grown up in Ohio, California, so like in the shadow of Patagonia and all that they were doing there as far as a business was concerned. And this was just completely not on my radar. I knew vaguely what Patagonia was. I didn't own any of their stuff, but when she began explaining these values, it did not take a lot of convincing for me. And I will also say that our foray into it was to just right away join 1% for the Planet because that was the org that Patagonia focused on, right? Yvon Chouinard co-founded that with his fly fishing buddy up in Montana and it just seemed like a very no-brainer. Clearly if you're giving 1% of your revenue you're doing a good amount of giving. That was the initial impetus. But then we started thinking, well I started thinking really deeply about where is this going, because the point of 1% is you give your money to nonprofits that are environmentally focused and they go out there and complete their mission. By that time I had become pretty convinced that the problem we need to be dealing with here is climate change, especially as it pertained to Peak Design, because I've always been a firm believer that we extract raw materials from the earth and we combine them with energy to turn them into finished products, we ship them all over the world, more energy, they get used, we don't have a lot of electronics especially at that time so not a lot of energy used during that time, but eventually they get thrown away. But at no part of that journey did I think that Peak Design is participatory in anything that is really damning to the environment save for our energy usage and where that energy comes from. And of course, I've learned a lot more about the ways that each of our factories utilize water and also the social implications. And that's why you'll see Peak Design today has a wide ranging sustainability strategy. But that focus on climate change and my desire to put my nickels into the climate change anti-climate change machine was kind of hard to find. So that led to the formation of Climate Neutral a few years after we joined our environmental movement.
Can you share a little bit about Climate Neutral and how others can get involved if they want to? Is it only for brands? If you could just share more that'd be great.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the first thing to share is that it's no longer called Climate Neutral.
Yeah. I was going to say sorry once you said that I was like I think you rebranded.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We rebranded. For a lot of reasons that I don't really need to get into because they're complex. We rebranded it The Climate Label. That's the thing that brands can and in my opinion should be in pursuit of. And The Climate Label is the most comprehensive certification label that a brand can apply for that is specific to their efforts vis-à-vis climate change. It requires that brands measure their carbon footprint. We've got excellent tools that we've developed and a framework for other tools and the provision set around what can be utilized there. So brands have to measure their carbon footprint, understand where it's coming from. They have to come up with credible reduction strategies for every year. But then crucially, they have to multiply that carbon footprint by a price of carbon that The Climate Label sets. And they have to show that they're spending at least that amount on mitigation efforts. And there's a whole really thoughtful framework about how that spending can happen, where it can happen so that you can actually be assured that these dollars are going towards things that move the needle on climate.
That's awesome, man. It's super inspiring. It's also funny to hear your point about look, it took 16 years and some of these businesses are finally able to get off the ground. My first startup before my watch brand was a sustainability business and we had so many ideas and so little execution, but it was the only thing I thought about day in day out for 18 months and then it's cool to see actually what's happening. So anyway,
It is cool, man. And obviously all things, my wife's a climate focused VC and you know this whole world has taken its lumps especially in the last call it two years. I don't know what happened exactly, but for one reason or another, it's really gotten its ass kicked. But at least from outward appearances, but I tell you what, the work continues. It really does. And it does that because one, most people have not forgotten that climate change is an incredible threat. And two, it is making economic sense. And I'm so thrilled that like
