Conation Collective Uncategorized Archives - Page 6 of 7

What are your full moon plans?

August 20, 2013

Full moon prototype testing

A few months ago I was invited to climb a 14er (Colorado term for a 14,000 foot mountain) by the light of the moon. We did the entire hike without lights, summitting around 3am. It was an incredible experience, and just as the sun started to rise over the eastern ridges we reached the bikes we had stashed along the trail. You can read the whole story here.

We rode down at around 5am, and in the picture above you can see the first prototypes of Conation Collective shorts. We used blank (undyed) fabric because it’s cheaper to make prototypes that way, but rest assured the production version will look sweet and won’t show dirt as easily as the prototypes.

Let us know if you have any awesome full moon plans, and how your apparel plays in to your adventure!

New Logo!

August 14, 2013

Check out our new logo! Let us know what you think.

Productive Night

August 14, 2013

This is what a productive night at Conation Collective HQ looks like.

It’s almost 3am, but this is the beauty of entrepreneurialism. I went to coffee this morning. I went for a bike ride. I hung out with friends.

But when the sublimation proofs arrived on my doorstep I knew I needed to tweak the photoshop files. The pin stripe was indiscernible at 2.66 pixels – it needed to be 5. But I wasn’t getting off that easy, oh no, the dotted line path in the Photoshop file looked completely different at twice the pixel width, so the whole file needed to be reworked. The shirt pattern needed the stripe widths adjusted too, but that was much easier.

Tonight I had to decide if I want snaps spaced on webbing every 30mm, or 45. It’s a big decision and I don’t want to mess it up. Should a belt be 5cm tall, 4, or 3.8? And why is a strange number like 3.8 the most common belt height? This is the crunch time where everything has to come together at once. I received production quotes from people tonight about products I had forgotten I needed to source. Good thing I had a checklist last week and sent most of my sourcing emails then.

In other exciting news, we have a fresh logo. Look for it once I emerge from this sleep deprived haze in the morning.

It’s now past 3 – g’night.

Rough Thursday

August 4, 2013

On Thursday I went to check out a new training facility in Thorton. They have trampolines, a skate park, and a huge airbag for practicing tricks. Everyone was warming up and practicing landing in the airbag. After a few drops and a successful front flip, I decided to try a gainer for the first time in my life. I landed the first one on my back which wasn’t so bad, but the second one was. I landed on my head, folding my chin into my sternum as I felt each of my vertebra pop. I immediately moved my fingers and toes and then gave a thumbs up to let people know I was ok. However, the back of my head was completely numb and my neck muscles were seizing and cramping.

New challenges all the time

July 29, 2013

I hope I never have a reason to see the inside of my computer again.

Last Tuesday my computer died. I got the rainbow pinwheel of death (that sounds so much less menacing that the “blue screen of death”) that eventually turned off my computer. I took it into the Apple store – confusingly right next to the Mac makeup store in Boulder – and they told me the hard drive was corrupted.

This was not what I wanted to hear 4 days after announcing my company to the world.

I decided there was nothing I could do but buy a new one – not having a computer is not an option when running a business. I bought a hard drive online the next morning, borrowed roommates computers when available, and constantly checked the tracking info. When it arrived today I set upon my MacBook Pro with tiny tools, and it seems to be working! Hope I didn’t mess anything up.

Outdoor Retailer (a historical summary, part 5)

July 26, 2013

George asked if I had been to the OR show, and then told me I HAD to go if I wanted to launch an outdoor brand. He was right.

The Outdoor Retailer show is in Salt Lake City, and turned out to be a heck of a weekend for me. I got in touch with my friend Heather who’s a nurse in SLC and asked if I could crash at her place for a weekend. With a couch lined up, I found a Craigslist Ridesharer, took a day’s leave from my 9-5, and set off.

The Craigslist Ridesharer was terrible. She wanted me to drive well below the speed limit even when the highway was straight, flat, and dry, and couldn’t handle it when I passed 18-wheelers. We of course made it all the way to SLC without incident, but when we got there the city was covered in ice. Literally. I opened the car door, put one foot down, and ended up sitting on the ground. A ¼ inch layer of freezing rain had coated every flat surface making driving and walking very dangerous. I arrived at Heather’s just as she was coming home from the bars with some friends.

I had torn my shoulder while skiing two weeks before so with my back pack slung over one arm and the other in a sling, I ventured into the OR show at the Salt Palace Convention Center. It was completely overwhelming, and I spent the first few hours just trying to get my bearings. I walked through a large exhibition hall before realizing it was just a collection of the late registrants and people they couldn’t put anywhere else – I didn’t even know there was a fabric area to the show. I reviewed the floor map while eating lunch, discovered my mistake, and made a bee-line for the textile area.

Minimums are a new brand’s worst enemy, and I ran into plenty of dead-ends because of that. It got the point where my opening question was “What are your MOQ’s?” There were some decently cool fabrics there, but a lot of them wanted several thousand yard orders and there’s no way I would want to place that for my first production run.

I talked to anyone that would talk to me. Half the time I think they just felt bad for me walking around in a sling, but people know people and I got several valuable referrals by refusing to be shy.

After the OR Show a day at Alta was in order. Safety First though – I wore the sling all day.

Stalled (a historical summary, part 4)

July 25, 2013

By the time I got back from South America I was completely broke and put the project on hold. I landed a job in Boulder and moved back, looking forward to riding in the mountains again.

I started an intense regiment of physical therapy in the Fall of 2011, hoping to heal my hip from a motorcycle accident a year eariler. It didn’t work, and six months later I was on an operating table. You can read about the ordeal here, but basically I wasn’t able to walk for a while and came out of it with a renewed passion for riding bicycles, especially off-road.

Recovering from hip surgery

In the Fall of 2012 I was introduced to a former product developer for a major cycling brand, George. He has been on of the most important connections I’ve made, and has been a tremendous help. If you don’t know what you’re doing in an industry, you need to meet someone who has the technical knowledge and that’s what I found in George.

Ironically, the first thing he told me to do was to learn Adobe Illustrator and make sketches on that program. Illustrator is a huge program, and I spent most of autumn 2012 learning how to draw what I wanted. I’m sure that professional companies use this all the time, but I think it was largely a waste of time for me. I didn’t know enough to make useful “tech sketches” and to date no one has looked at my drawings in a .ai file.

Its so perrrty, and no one’s even looked at it.

Working in South America (a historical summary, part 3)

July 24, 2013

In December of 2010 I was laid off from one of the largest BMX companies in the world. I decided it would be a great time to focus on my own business, the only problem was I didn’t know what I was doing. I had ideas for the clothing, but I didn’t know how to make it a reality.

I spent about two months developing “sketches,” colorways, and patterns. I bought a thread-puller and painstakingly took apart my favorite shirt so I could mimic the fit. This was very helpful from a brainstorming perspective, but completely pointless from a production standpoint.

Early Sketches

Southern California was too expensive so I hopped a flight to Ecuador and spent a month sitting on the beach and sifting through the international trade website Alibaba.com.

The view from my “office” in Ecuador wasn’t so bad

If you’re trying to make a product that’s already been made and just want to make minor tweaks then Alibaba, and similar trade sites, are amazing. Unfortunately, I spent most of my time beating on a brick wall. The language barrier was a huge problem, as was the culture of innovation in larger factories.

A particularly frustrating exchange occurred this way:

· I emailed a factory asking if they could make a “western” or “cowboy” shirt. I specifically said my garments could not have ANY cotton.

· The factory said it was no problem to source 0% cotton fabrics

· I asked if they could send me pictures of the shirts they had made in that style.

· The factory sent me several pictures of decent looking shirts in the style I wanted. They were a little square, but I thought I could tweak the design so they had more taper and would fit a cyclist’s body type better.

· I asked what the fabric content was.

· The factory said “100% cotton” as if that was a mark of their superior quality

The factories thought that if I wanted bike apparel I must want lycra road gear, and if I wanted casual apparel then their 100% cotton fabric would be the most cost efficient and comfortable option. With my experience and vocabulary, there was no way to convey that I didn’t want either of these.

Product Development (a historical summary, part 2)

July 23, 2013

Product development wasn’t terribly complicated. I rode my bike a lot, and every time I wished my cloths performed differently I would take notes. Longer inseam, better fit, bigger pocket, all these critiques ended up on a Google doc. I used a cloud-based document so I could edit it from anywhere and wouldn’t forget things by the time I made it back to my own personal computer.

Conation Collective is a group effort though, we can’t get everything right ourselves. What features in your current cloths do you love? Which ones do you hate? Please leave comments below, Tweet us @ConationCLCTVE, or leave a note on our Facebook page so we can build the absolute best garments possible.

The beginning (a historical summary, part 1)

July 22, 2013

I’ve been working on starting a mountain bike apparel line for a long time. I’ll be posting installments of the backstory for those of you that are interested, even though they’ll mess up the chronology of the blog for a bit. -Matt

—

Conation Collective started from a frustration over the current offering of mountain bike clothing. Coming from a racing background, I was used to apparel designed with function over form. For as silly as it looks, lyrca has some great technical features.

As I got out of the racing scene I started wearing baggy garb because it was more versatile. Riders in Boulder, CO have the unique opportunity to take public transit from town, gain 2000ft of elevation, and then ride all day on beautiful single-track trails back down to town. Sitting on a public bus in skin tight clothing is awkward. So is stopping by the local coffee shop where most riders meet, stopping for a lunch snack, and grabbing a post-ride brew with friends.

The more I rode in baggy apparel the more I hated it. The chamois (I confirmed the plural of that word with Merriam-Webster) sucked and were barely worthy of the name. The fabrics were heavy, and the ventilation was controlled by a plethora of breakable zippers that looked almost as goofy as spandex. My friends and I resorted to riding in a road bib with a pair of casual shorts and shirt over it.

We worked in the best bike shops in one of the biggest cycling towns in America – we had access to any piece of riding wear in production, and we were pedaling around in a horrendous amalgamation of road bike gear and casual clothes in the hope that it would all add up to passable mountain bike wear.

My personal breaking point came when I realized the best fitting and most comfortable mountain bike shorts I had found were built of a cotton-based fabric. Cotton is one of the worst materials for outdoor apparel because it absorbs water quickly and takes a long time to dry leaving people cold, wet, and at times hypothermic. I was furious that a company would claim to make technical sportswear, and then make garments about as technical as jeans.

This was the impetus of the Conation Collective.

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