Welcome to Measured Impact, where we share behind-the-scenes stories of the world's leading mission-driven companies. Because when it comes to activism, brand building, and revenue growth, we believe profits and purpose are mutually exclusive. Let's dive in.
All right, we are super psyched for today's episode on Measured Impact. We are joined by Peter Daring, founder and CEO of Peak Design and co-founder of the Change Climate Project. What began as a solution to a personal frustration while traveling with camera gear has grown into one of the most distinctive product brands in photography, travel, and everyday carry. Peter has built Peak Design into an investor-free BC Corp with a mission to build happy, meaningful lives while making great products and taken measurable responsibility for the environmental footprint. Today, we're going to talk about independence, purpose, and trade-offs that come with building a brand as great as Peak. And I will in full transparency say I am a Peak Design fanboy. Um, and I will try not to act as such too often. So, Peter, thanks for being here, man.
Super happy to be here and be my guest. By the way, I don't know about that intro. That was I struggled so hard to figure out how to describe this company. You nailed it. We got some openings here on the marketing team. And if we don't, we can make them.
Well, hopefully Emily's not listened too much because I definitely did not write it and she did.
You know, Emily, close your ears. So, you know, when we talk on measured impact, we like to kind of start at the origin story. And I've actually, I'm guessing a decent portion of our audience heard the typical Peak Design origin story, frustration with traveling, you decided to build a product. My question for you specifically is how and when did you decide that having a sort of progressive activism, climate friendly element to the brand was going to be part of who you guys were?
That's a great question. I love the question. So I could spend way too much time on that origin story, but you nailed it. I was traveling in India, had a camera with me the whole time around the neck. It sucked. I thought I was riding a lot of motorcycles and stuff and I came up the idea of like rigidly attaching it to the backpack strap. It would take two years before I would quit my day job.
And what was the day job?
I was a construction engineer. So a civil civil engineering school. Loved big construction. Hated the bureaucracy of big construction. The bureaucracy just drove me absolutely mad and really like steered me toward entrepreneurship. Um, but you asked a question about how did it get impact focused and I'd say that there are a couple events to link together. One my senior capstone course at University of Wisconsin Madison um was a construction make a building and it was a green building and and so um that was the first time like the true concept of sustainability this 2006 came into my purview um and I chased it real hard. I became the first lead AP at my construction company called McCarthy Building Companies and drove a lot of their kind of green building initiatives and I was really amped because it allowed me to like find purpose in that job and I was just like I developed a reputation as kind of like the guy who's plugged into all that green stuff happening over there. Um, and I was proud of that when I again for the sake of the bureaucracy pushed into doing my own thing which was the most liberating wonderful choice I ever made. I actually had no idea how to bring anything about my passions about energy or sustainability into this. I should also say the companies I was trying to start were not a photographic accessory company. I was trying to do floating photovoltaics. That was one idea that I had. And an idea I chased even further was a regenerative brake mechanism for electrified trains. And so think about subways pulling into the station. I was going to use either ultra capacitors or flywheels to store that energy and pump it right back into that same chain train. It's a balanced load. And like that whole 2008 clean tech movement, I was just like you could pump that stuff into my veins. I mean, I was so excited by all that. Reading green tech media, you know, like basically hiding out in like the construction trailer temporary bathrooms and reading green tech media and fantasizing of working in energy. That's where you could find me in 2008. But the challenge of entering those businesses compared with the kind of bite-sizeness of the invention of the capture camera clip is what drove me that direction. And really what I think what you could take from that is that I was more inclined toward working for myself than I was working in the world of energy. It's also fair to say I did not get into the energy and resources group grad program at Berkeley nor the mechanical engineering program for power electronics at Stanford. So I was like well don't have a job better make one.
I'm very familiar. My company, our origin story was always, you know, I can make it grandiose if I want, but the reality was the agency I worked for shut down and I needed a job and it was 2008, so it was easier to make one.
We get to write our own stories. So there were several years, let's call it 2010 when I started Peak Design until 2015 where I had virtually no concept of how sustainability would enter the equation. I mean at this time I was not using FSC certified packaging. Yes, there is some recycled aluminum just because diecast aluminum happens to contain some recycled aluminum just generally speaking. But like I just didn't even think about these two things together. And then one of the people that we had hired early in the company, Annie Nyborg, grew up in Ohigh, kind of in the shadow of Patagonia. And she was just steeped in the idea that consumer brands can and should be stewards and advocates for the environment. And frankly, I was naive to that. I this is a guy who when I started Peak Design and I lived in California, I'm not sure I knew I like kind of knew the company Patagonia, but like I was not a consumer brand chaser and I did not know their story whatsoever. By that time, of course, I was deeply involved in it. And Annie brought up the idea of joining 1% for the planet and it was 1% of sales going there. And these were the early days of Peak Design. We were a very profitable company and it was a no-brainer. Like it just instantly I was like, 'Oh, this is really cool. I like and respect Patagonia. This is what they did and I like the idea of creating a budget for ways that we can give to environmental advocacy and start building ourselves into this type of brand.' It was just like love what Patagonia has done. I want to pursue that. I want to share their values and they've kind of laid out a roadmap in 1% for the planet. And so the creation of that budget of 1% of our sales would then lead eventually to kind of what I think is the most sincere thing that we have done for the environmental movement was the formation of at the time climate neutral now what is called the change climate project. But that was the inflection point joining 1% for the planet at the kind of request of Annie Nyorg, one of my employees.
It's really cool. It's always interesting to hear. It sounds like in a lot of ways the activism and the planet stuff came second. Did you at some point realize that it wasn't necessarily something that had to come from a scarcity mindset? I think myself and maybe you know the average person when they're starting a business, you sort of think about activism or donations to any kind of cost as coming at a cost without tangible upside necessarily. And my outside perspective is companies like Patagonia have actually figured out that it actually helps them sell more stuff to give people a brand that they want to kind of have a relationship with. And so I'm curious if if you from the beginning thought of it that way or if it took you a while to think about kind of how your activism would shape how people had a relationship with the brand and and then maybe it becomes less of a scarcity more so into a hey actually this is kind of core to our brand how people think about us.
Totally. I think that it felt like a very natural progression when we did it. And what I mean by that is like we were I always thought that we were different than most companies. We had like a very close relationship with our customer and like our version of I think activism at least from my vantage felt like extraordinary transparency into even like what we're you know how much we're paying for products who we're getting them from and like I've got a good boy complex. I'm from Minnesota. I want I want the world to see me as a good boy. There's a nice boy Peter. You know, I still have that like deeply built into who I am. And that part was there for the first four years of selling products, but it just wasn't married with the more strategic like, okay, this is how you put being a good boy into action, you know, and I don't mean to trigger.
Can we monetize being a good boy? What's the ROI on being a good boy?
Right. Right. Right. It certainly wasn't thought of from an ROI standpoint. Again like the idea that we were doing having to do calculations to figure out ROI didn't come until much later in the business when we entered much more competitive markets where we were make we were always making the first and only of a kind with almost all of our early products and so that meant that we had room to create we had big margins and so it was brand building without any expectation of ROI it's really only in the later years when I mean so much has changed about the business world and the consumer world and competition and I mean the late the latest thing of course is tariffs that like just compression pressure using the word compression and pressure at the same time and making up a new word but that's what it feels like and now it's almost like we're forced into thinking about the ROI. I still think it is absolutely there. It's, you know, now that we're a more sophisticated business, I think it's useful to sort of measure that in a way, even if it's not precise, but it's still very much in the black for us as far as a decision to maintain a brand that isn't just jumping through the hoops on things, but really thoughtfully approaching what does make a difference in this world and what doesn't make a difference in this world.
Yeah. Well, it's a super compelling approach and for the listener who's not as familiar, you know, I would describe your brand as one that started pretty holistically focused on a specific audience being photographers and photography gear and and enabling them to be, you know, more efficient and and adventurous. And I would say today, if I were to introduce the company to somebody new, I'd more likely say they make cell phone accessories or bags, right? Like I I just think those spaces are much more competitive, as you're saying. Um, so it it's it's interesting to think about how that pressure to measure would change as you go through an evolution in the products that you guys are are pushing out the door. My I guess my question for you is if I understand correctly, there's no outside investment in Peak Design.
Do you think you could do everything that you were doing today from a progressive values, climate pledge, all the things? Would it all be living today if if things were different and you had outside investors who were targeted at the bottom line?
Almost certainly not. However, I will say this. So, Peak Design has never had outside investors, but I did give about 32% of the company, the value of the company to the employees in the form of phantom stock. So, I have to take it on just a little bit of a journey here. That phantom stock instead of it like just being like something that only converts into money for my employees if I sell the company. I created a a fixed date mechanism, a payout date, which was 10 years after they joined the company that stock is going to pay out. And so that started happening um July 1st of 2023. And so it's a it's an interesting situation now. Uh that 32% of the value is a a lot, right? Um and so basically about $20 million in what was previously our working capital has gone out to pay the employees this Phantom stock and they have no obligation to continue working here. Almost all of them do still work here, which is incredible. And so the reason I bring this up is because for the first time in the history of the company, I am actually at work right now on bringing an investor into the company. Um, and I mean this is a this is something I I brought up to all the employees in our February all hands. We have everybody come into the company and I've been extremely resistant to this because I do not want someone coming in here and telling us how to run the business. And very pertinent to your question like are they going to allow for this now that we have established ourselves in doing all the things that we are doing I think an in any investor that we're talking to is impact focused right like they they they get it and like we have become like the darlings of the like all these doors to the impact funds are wide open saying come on in let's have a chat and this is because we built the brand we talk the talk but we also walk the walk when it comes to to impact. And so, not only do we get to keep these principles and stay in their hot pursuit, we've created the mandate. And I just don't think you get there if you go in to an initial investor pitch meeting that says we're going to be the environmentally focused camera brand, uh, camera accessories brand. I don't think that happens, especially not in 2011.
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting to think about kind of the the sequence being pretty important. It's almost like there's a a a need in most cases, especially if there's you're dealing with any kind of outside funding mechanism. You almost have to downplay the progressive side to say we're going to make great stuff and we're going to make money and also this is kind of core to who we are, which is our brand has this commitment to
Some set of values or some set of, you know, mission. I think that we have been able to show that pursuit of environmental goals and pursuit of like real generosity toward our employees is a recipe that makes money and yeah uh that's why it's it's a good position to be in right now.
Well, so then my next natural question um we have lots of folks who are in the space and are all trying to lean towards measurement that leads to decision-m. So in that vein, what can you guys measure that is outside the scope of maybe just pure margins or revenue or sales that that works towards those goals being you know your your impact on the planet and also you know enabling your employees. I think somewhere we read you you had said caring about having happy employees is a big part of of who peak wants to be. So how and what can you measure to see whether or not you're doing those things? I'll tell you after the investment comes in. And the reason I say that is because they're going to they're going to look at our books, right? And look look at our book value. And they're going to come in there and they're going to see a couple of figures that are interesting, right? They'll say, 'Wow, last year you sold $106 million worth of camera gear. That's your biggest year ever. And we've grown every single year. Boy, I only see 2% IBITa.' Right. Like that's pretty that's pretty thin margins.
Mhm. And so when we go out there and look for an investor, if we're valued purely on our IBIDA, which is how I'd say most businesses go to market, right? There's some What industry are you in? Okay. What are your margins? Cool. Here's a multiple of your margins. That is just not at all the process of how Peak Design is going to market. We are I'm trying to sell 10% of the company approximately and we're trading on our brand and and so like the line item that shows up on an actual balance sheet right is called goodwill and that is what we have been developing over the past 16 years. Now that's not entirely the environmental story or the incredible employee retention that we have here. It is also just found in the how do people feel about the company. You described yourself as a fanboy and you know if I had a nickel for every time I kind of see someone in the airport with a peak bag and I I just like hey how do you how do you like your backpack and you know I they just get profusely into how much they like their backpack but not only that like the brand and then about half the people go like hey do I do I recognize you and and and of course I get that little dopamine hit there of like yes we made a cool brand where there are fanboys and and here's one out here in the child and I still I I get I get a I get such satisfaction out of that because it's people who like have really connected with a company in like in in a way that's unique and I I have that connection with only a few companies myself, you know, and I know that Peak Design is one of those brands that's capable of that. And I can't tell you precisely what component of that is our willingness to stand up for what we believe in and our willingness to put a good amount of our money toward environmental causes, but it ain't nothing. That's for sure.
Yeah. Well, I think you guys are meeting this prerequisite, right? And the prerequisite is that the product is good. You can't have this first conversation without the second, right? Or vice versa. Um, and I think similar to the story we were saying before with this idea of you got to build a great thing and then how you build it, who you build it for and the relationship that you can create, it can come after that. But if the product sucks, nobody wants to have a relationship with an environmentally friendly brand who makes shitty products, right? Like they they want to they want to commit to something that they can be proud of. On that environmental side, uh, just purely on the impact there, how do you guys think about the impact that you're having? How do you measure it? How would you how's your team structured in terms of who's responsible for the stewardship of those funds and and that kind of stuff? How do you guys think about it?
Right on. So Annie um you know the one the woman who brought in the idea of 1% for the planet. She was heading up sales at that moment. She was like I am not a salesp person. I'm like I know Annie but we don't have another one. We need you to do that. She went fulltime on environmental initiatives I believe in 2016. Like, you know, like there's some component of of a marketing and getting the brand awareness out there and creating events and being the ultimate cheerleader for this whole side of the business. And so she runs it now. She actually hired a super smart dude named Oliver who came over from PRAA. He's actually now moved over to the manufacturing team because so much of the actual work of sustainability happens with our manufacturers, right? Anyone who's ever had the the the privilege of going over to Asia, primarily Asia or other places where there are factories, but primarily Asia, and seeing what the world's workshop looks like is just smacked in the face with like, okay, it's all happening here. Like, yes, products get shipped around the globe. Yes, there are either airplane or container ship emissions that that that we need to worry about. Vast majority of things happens in the conversion of raw materials into physical products. And so if you want to be serious about environmental stewardship, you've got to understand how the sausage is made. And so I like that team of of two right there is is part of it, but like it's also got to be woven into everybody's job here at Peak Design. And we talk about three things at Peak Design that kind of give hierarchy to like, hey, what the hell are we doing here? The first one is the purpose. The purpose of Peak Design is to create happy and meaningful lives for the people that work at Peak Design. That is the purpose. It's the purpose for me. I I am here to create a happy life for myself and I want that purpose for everyone else. Then we've got the mission. There are six points to that. Then we've got our work principles and there are 12 points to that. Both the mission and the work principles start to get specific about how it's everybody's job to be stewards of the environment in their particular area. Annie conducts multiple sessions throughout the year that kind of are constantly cluing people into how they can they can do that. It works into our our goal framework that we have at the beginning of the year and that we're we're doing quarterly check-ins on. But I think quite specifically we're here to fulfill that purpose. But to fulfill that purpose, we got to make products that are sweet. And when you make products that are sweet, they have carbon emissions. We we basically get into the formation of climate neutral. So 2015 created the we're going to give 1% of sales to the environment. Cool. Well, what do we do with that? For those first three years, we were giving to uh environmental nonprofits with one mission or another. But I was particularly stalwart in my belief that like the main thing that Peak Design is responsible for here is carbon emissions. And I I almost like to point it out starkly, okay? Like we've got raw material extraction from the earth. We we combine those raw materials with a bunch of energy and then a bunch of energy to move it and eventually those products get thrown away in the trash. Even though we make great products with a lifetime warranty, that is where they will end up.
But I think about the those three major steps, raw material extraction, the energy it takes for all of it, and then landfill. All those things have an effect on the environment but only one of those to my eye at least is that that is where the the change is happening. Raw material extraction we have so many of the materials that we're using like so so many inclusive of all the prochemicals that go into all the nylons and the polyurethanes and the polycarbonates that we utilize. We have a lot of those and it's not their extraction. It is the energy it takes to extract them. That is the tough part there. And and then let's talk about landfill for a second. We are not running out of landfill. If you ever go if you ever go in an airplane, you'll see that the vast majority of the surface of our planet is not covered in landfill. Now, does that mean that that trash in the oceans isn't a huge problem? No, it is. And that pollution of particularly waterways as a result of poor landfill management is a problem. It is. But in the western world um and and the places where our products are sold, sanitation and landfill is like a problem that we're doing a pretty good job with actually. So it all ladders up to carbon. And so what I wanted was for there to be the anti-climate change machine where I'm just sticking the nickels into that equivalent to what part of a problem are we are we responsible for and how can I best mitigate that. So that's that's what I'd say we show up most fervently. Not only are we doing that for ourselves, but we created the framework along with Jonathan Cedar at Biolit. I I got together because they were deeply involved in the carbon offsets game a while ago or long before we were back in 20 2012. We teamed up and we made an extremely robust certification that my my now good friend had not met him before, but Austin Whitman has been running that organization since 2018. And and that dude is so sharp and so committed and he's built such a great team. The team at the Change Climate Project is they're just fervent believers in what they're doing and it has just so greatly magnified the impact beyond what Peak Design could have done on its own.
Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot of parallels when you tell your story to kind of the Patagonia switch from early days thinking about their potential to impact the planet as being something they had to do. It was them transitioning to a place where they were thinking about how to open supply chains that were more carbon neutral to all brands to the Walmarts of the world where they could find organic cotton or whatever. Right. And it sounds like you have you're sort of thinking about these things in two ways. One is how can peak itself have an impact and two is how can the change climate project layer into that in ways that a brand maybe never could and it's it's really compelling to see both at the same time. I'm curious on both sides.
How do you divide your day? like how do you think about your day and Peter's energy and like
You know you have to wear a bunch of different hats when you run a business but specifically in your case you're wearing a bunch of different hats that sometimes are a little bit at odds with each other right like if we spend our energy here or we build this forever bag that could change the world and maybe that means that has a larger footprint how do you think about breaking up your time in having maybe objectives that are disparit hour to hour meeting to meeting dayto day
Well I don't spend spend a lot of time premeditating my days. I try to keep an open calendar as much as I can. Like I do I do a lot of kind of just daydreaming and then I do a lot of bumping into stuff. I call it I just kind of roam around the office and I'm bumping into people and I'm coming up like, 'Hey, here's an idea.' Like a lot of that sort of thing. It's jazz, you know? Like when I'm doing my best, it's jazz. It's not that I mind a completely blocked calorie, but like what am I doing here? Oh, I'm going to talk with Dimmitri after this because he's concerned that there's so much opportunity in Europe and we don't spend enough time over there. We don't actually have the pulse of what's going on. He he's he's a one of our European sales guys and he wants to talk to me about that. So, I'm going to talk to him about that. Oh, then I've got a call with uh Hillary Hartley, the the president of Tuli North America. Tulie is kind of like they've wanted to to to like um well buy our mobile business for a long time and like I don't want to sell it but I like Tulie and I respect Tulie and I think I have a lot to learn from someone like Hillary and so we've just kind of been been chatting about that stuff. Oh, there's a u there's a paddle game like paddle the the sport. I'm a squash player and and now paddle is a very fun racket sport. Then we got the exact team week. Then I'm gonna sit down with Emma, our new social media chair, and tell her about the history of Peak Design because I've never we've never written it down, you know, and I got some time in between there. I don't know what I'm gonna do with that. That's great. I'll probably have to go into Slack and see what's going on.
So, outside of the measurement side or the impact side really, I'm I'm curious. It sounds like you've been pretty intentional about protecting your time to do so. Give me a tactical way that that plays itself out for you or for the team or how do you instill that ethos in the brand of I would say when we talk to our our agency clients, right? It's like I've got 15 minutes free next Thursday, right? Uh it just sounds like such an awful way to live. So I'm always curious how companies manifest that in in the world because if you if you're full of meetings and everybody else on your team is full of meetings and then there's meetings on meetings and meetings. How do you guys think about sort of creating a culture that allows for the bumping around of things?
I I put I put it in the purpose like and and the purpose of the company is to build happy and meaningful lives for the people that work here. And so um and and and I I live it, you know, I like I show up here and I I I mean there have definitely been times when you can see the anxiety on my face, right? Like we we we had 2% profit last year. We had negative 1% profit the year before. Never even brushed like losing money in a year and all of a sudden we didn't. I I wore that dark cloud for like a year and it was it was just like I I felt the way that it translated to everyone but I couldn't help it. I felt so deeply irresponsible for where we had gotten. I've since learned and understood so much more about that period of time. But I have returned to a place of confidence and funloving. And I think when there is such an outward focus on like guys the point of life is like is to is to at least from my vantage point I'm here to have a good time. That is the point of what we're doing. I remember this one time Brooks was a manager at a store. He was having problem. He like he was an army dude and he was like, you know, tough and like he was being so hard on his employees and he was like, 'But but Pete, man, like they got to know we're we're not here to [ __ ] around.' And I was like, 'Broos, hey man, we are here to [ __ ] around.' Yes, we are. We're here to [ __ ] around. That's the point. He had a tough time. He had a tough time getting it, but like, yeah, ideally, we're here to [ __ ] around. We don't always have that luxury, but boy, keep that as your north star and hopefully a lot of good things are going to happen.
Yeah, man. That's uh really cool to see uh play itself out at the scale you guys are doing. Before we get in our quickfires, my last question for you is what data or piece of information, could be a, you know, specific number, it could be a thing. Can you point to recently that changed how you thought about something? Whether that was in the impact side or on the um on the business side, what metric helped you think differently than you were thinking before? Product level contribution before marketing. That is to say, the actual when you add up the cost of the product and the cost of shipping and the cost of tariffs and the cost of warehouse storage, like so many of the operational bits, like which of our products are actually killing it and which ones are we actually closer to breaking even? And you might think like you didn't know that until recently and it's like nope. There's calculations that are the easy ones to do, but like it's actually quite a bit harder. We have 900 SKs now. It's actually really difficult to come by this information. And we've just realized that our bag business is just not as profitable as we would hope that it is. And it really comes down to the size and weight of these products compared to things like our straps and the capture camera clip. They are light. It is like, you know, economic intensity per weight or unit volume is is actually like son of a gun. No wonder these microchips are worth so much. No wonder Nvidia is killing it. This shit's light.
You guys thought about making microchips. I don't know. There seems to be
Yeah, we got to get in there, man.
