Okay, that was a week.
ISSW (the International Snow Science Workshop, for anyone outside the snow world) took over the Whistler Conference Centre from Sept 28 to Oct 2. It happens every few years and moves around the world. Last time it was in Norway. This time it was 45 minutes up the highway from our shop in Squamish, so yeah, we were going.
We were there for three of the five days. If you were there too, there's a decent chance you're reading this with one of our bags on your shoulder.
The bags (and the straps)
Every attendee got a RUX Bag 25L and a Utility Strap, both with the ISSW logo. 1,200 of each.
The funny thing about the bags is that ISSW ordered them before they really existed. The 25L was still mid-design when the order came in. I basically said trust me, it's going to be better than the current one, and they did! Watching everyone walk around the the village all week was a pretty good feeling. Bit of relief too, if I'm honest.
The straps were a no-brainer. Everyone in that room has a ski strap holding something together right now.
Why we actually went
Handing out bags is great, but it's not really why we set up a booth. We wanted to talk to these people.
Think about who's at ISSW. SAR teams. Avi techs. Heli, cat, lodge and yurt operators. Patrollers. Forecasters. People whose whole job involves gear going into places it shouldn't survive and coming back out again. We had people we know from ski ops in town, and others who'd flown in from Europe, Japan and South America asking how a box does in a float plane or on a sled.
So we asked pretty much everyone the same three things:
- How do you store and move your gear right now?
- What breaks, leaks or goes missing?
- What do you wish someone made?
Some of what came back:
Ops people don't really think about bags. They think about kits. The rescue cache, the first aid kit, the rope kit. They want to grab the right one at 2am with gloves on and know it's all there without digging through it. Labelling came up constantly.
Zippers suck. We've been saying it for years and it was very validating to hear a room full of pros say it right back. Iced shut, packed with snow, blown out halfway through a trip. Nobody trusts them.
Everything is wet, all the time. Snowmelt in the cat, sleds parked outside overnight, sleet in the heli basket. Waterproof isn't a feature for these folks, it's the minimum. Pretty much everyone had a story about a bag that wasn't.
How stuff stacks and ties down matters way more than how it looks. A lot of conversations ended up being about tie-down points.
SAR caches sit untouched for months and then have to work perfectly once, usually for someone who didn't pack them. That's a different design problem than most of us think about.
And then there's the list of very specific product requests in my notebook. Some we're already on. Some I hadn't thought of once. Not promising anything yet.
Why build for these pros
Simple really. If a box can handle a season in the back of a snowcat, loaded wet and unloaded frozen, it'll be fine in the back of your Tundra.
It's also just more fun. Ask most people what they want in a gear box and you get "waterproof I guess?" Ask a lodge operator who resupplies by sled and you get twenty minutes on latch design. I'll take the twenty minutes.
Custom Gear
ISSW is a pretty good example of how we like to do custom work. Sometimes it's a few dozen straps for a guiding company or a ski club. Sometimes it's a stack of Gear Boxes for an operator setting up their season. Sometimes it's 1,200 bags for a conference. Size doesn't really change much. Send us your logo, tell us how your crew actually uses its gear, and we'll work it out from there.
If that's you, reach out. Happy to chat.
Thanks
Big thanks to the ISSW crew for having us and for running a really good week. And to everyone who stopped by the booth, picked up a box and told us what they actually think, thank you. Seriously useful.
See you out there this winter.
Jamie Co-founder, RUX
