Marmot Mountain

A great question.

Uh, my first trip to Pakistan was in ninety-three, and I wrote, um, Tom Fritz at Marmot, who was the marketing director then, and I s- asked him if, if he'd consider giving me an alpinist parka and a bivy sack.

[laughs]

And he was, he was thrilled.

[laughs]

Yeah, that was sponsorship back in the day.

And then after that, he brought me onto the team, and I was with Marmot for a number of years, which is-- was a great relationship.

Um, I didn't pursue any other partnerships at all, and it wasn't a paid gig.

I always, when I go, I always first look for clothes because, uh, you know, to your point earlier, when you're getting in, you know, you don't necessarily wanna buy a $600 jacket, but you could buy, find that $600 jacket for maybe $200 jacket is a still a really good name brand.

And like I said, you know, no bad weather, just bad gear, and having name brands mean something, so being able to, to get into a Marmot jacket or a Columbia jacket even or some higher end ones like Arc'teryx or whatever, however you say that.

I still after 30 years can't say that.

But some of those, I think those are always good pants as well, um, good thing to look for.

So Patagonia finally came on board.

Actually, our breakthrough was We got Marmot and Merrill.

Merrill was a breakthrough.

And then all of a sudden we got Marmot, then we got Patagonia, then we got North Face, and then kind of every brand fell in after that.

Like some of the small brands saw what we were doing and loved it and jumped on board real quick.

But it took a while.

I mean, you could with certain companies, but we had inventory orders.

And then I had another part of I know you want to talk about this.