I'm excited to talk with Dana Gleason today. Dana's been making
packs for over 40 years in the outdoor industry. Some of the best
packs I've ever carried. It's always fun to catch up with him at
trade shows and now on the podcast.
The man behind Mystery Ranch packs, Dana Gleason, has
seen many pack trends and brands come and
go during his forty years of designing and sewing packs. Several of
the brands were his own, including Kletterwerks, which
he started as a young ski and climbing bum in 1975,
later revived by Dana’s son in 2012. In the late
70s and early 80s, Dana and business partner, Renee Sippel-Baker, threw
their creative energy into Mojo Systems and Quest camera
bags. Dana’s namesake brand, Dana Design was established in 1985
quickly becoming the pack to trust for
uncompromising durability and a comfortable carry among
mountaineers and backpackers. As is often
the case with entrepreneurial brands, cash for growth was
needed and Dana and Renee ended up selling
off their interest in each of those brands. In 2000, after some time off, Dana and Renee once again
crafted a small selection of durable packs
for a new endeavor, Mystery Ranch.
“The fact that we’ve succeeded in
this is more than luck. ‘Luck’ consists of holding on to the
good stuff and letting go of the bad,” explains
Dana as he recounts his history building packs. After 40 years, Dana has observed dozens of load-carrying
systems come and go. He’s seen trends like
the superlight movement catch the interest of consumers and he’s
seen the pendulum swing in the opposite
direction for professionals whose highest priority is a
comfortable carry. As the majority of US factories
were shut down, and production moved overseas, Dana has observed quality become inconsistent. He’s
seen fabrics and materials evolve from the
original thick rust Cordura to the high tenacity
lightweight versions available today. All
this experience has found significance in the new 2016 Mystery
Ranch packs, which like all of Dana’s packs
are Built For The Mission.
How
did You get interested in the Outdoors
It
was definitely as a kid and I have to thank my parents. It wasn't
purely backpacking, I was raised just outside of Boston and my
parents who were florists had their own independent business, a
flower shop. They always took time off in the summer, which
actually as florists is easy to do. It's a slow time of the year
and we would go up to New Hampshire and camp in all sorts of
places. For the most part, we were dragging a tent camper and we'd
be up there a couple of weeks at a time and doing all sorts of day
trips, climbing Mount Washington or Mount Jefferson. It just was
normal, very fun. And, then at age 12 they then badly warped me
when we did a six week trip across the country, out to the Rockies
and then up through Yellowstone. And we got to out with a cousin of
mine do some stupid things in the Tetons.
After
College, I wanted to stay connected to the outdoors and I had an
opportunity to start working at a shop. Admittedly, it was a shop
in the Chicago area, which is not exactly what one would think of
as, Hey, I'm in the mountains. Right. But basically people in
Chicago, they badly need a trip when the opportunity comes up. So,
you know, helping out at a shop there, the first year or two got me
into what we grandly call show business.
After
designing and building outdoor packs for over 40 years, what
inspired your first design?
Pain
and frustration. I was using the gear of the time and there were
some improvements that were clearly needed. I had graduated from
using Kelty outdoor packs, and trying to use it for all things
including ski touring, climbing and other stuff. And while they are
a hell of a pack on the trail, they are a hideous torture machine
when it comes to actually trying to do approaches or climb or
ski.
I
started applying some further thought to that. And this was after
I'd been doing a couple of years of mods and custom work and had a
decent heavy-duty machine. This was during a time when I was
shifting from managing an outdoor store to becoming a sales rep,
which was utterly important because you can get great ideas and
feedback.
Dana
design pack was one of the outdoor packs to have in the eighties
and nineties except for the first three years. No one had heard of
us. No one wanted to see it, I couldn't get it going in a store, I
even tried to hire reps. It was such a unique design.
A
person I hired back in 1978 at clutter works as a seamstress that
came to work with me and came to become the obvious choice for the
manager of the sewing floor. Two years in, we had a rather historic
meeting at a picnic table where we had bag lunches and I confessed
that “I'm screwing this up. I recognize I'm screwing this up and
how do we make this go?” That person's name was Renee Sippel Baker.
She then became my business partner through three of these things
over the last 40 years.
Mystery Ranch Outdoor Packs has been around for 20
years. What was the inspiration for that brand?
I had
no intention of doing an outdoor pack company or even something in
the outdoor industry. I still had some sewing machines and my
eldest daughter Alice asked me for something that she claimed I
hadn't really built during her lifetime, which was a simple hip
sack. We had built big, complex ones, ones where you could put 10
kilos on your waist and carry reasonably comfortably, but you
needed a few extra straps and you kind of had to operate it. She
wanted something simple. So I did three, four days worth of work
and it kind of felt cool to be doing something from scratch. I
still built something we call lumbar wrap and I handed it to her
and she put it on and it worked. And she turned around and looked
at me and said, “thanks,
dad. That's just what I wanted” with a big smile.
We have
some really pretty darn good tricks and the thing going from the
birth of Mystery Ranch, which was entirely about getting back into
the outdoor industry and working with specialty shops and building
outdoor packs that would matter for them.
Advice for someone wanting to get into the other
business or grow their outdoor career
First
off, working in a retail store. You need to not just get into what
you would like, but to see what other people are after and how it
is to in fact interact with them. It's really kind of necessary to
learn what makes the frog jump.
Things we talked about
Mystery Ranch
Dana Design
Kletterworks
Mojo Systems
K2
Kelty
Don Jensen
Marmot
A16
Gregory
Wayne Gregory
Great Pacific Iron Works
Black Diamond
Patagonia
Montbell
Eagle Creek
Dyneema
ISO 9001
Bozeman. MT
Eastern Sierra
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