From an Idea to Our First 300 Backpacks

The buckle broke at mile four.

I was on the first section of the Appalachian Trail north of Amicalola Falls, hiking out and back to test some new gear. I picked that stretch on purpose. The climb to Springer Mountain is steep, and it stays steep for miles. If something in your kit is going to fail, it will fail there. That is the whole reason to walk it with new gear on your back.

The pack I was testing was a budget model. The hipbelt buckle let go on a switchback, and after that the entire load sat on my shoulders for the walk out. Nothing about it was dangerous. It was just a long, sour afternoon caused by a piece of plastic that cost the manufacturer almost nothing.

Here is the other half of the problem. I have carried expensive packs too, and they do not break. Besides the hit on your cash pile, they just make you work. Stop, unclip, set the pack down in the mud, and pull half of it apart to reach the rain shell you need right now and the map you will need in twenty minutes. Do that forty times over three days and it stops being a small annoyance.  And where do I find a place to hang my spare pair of shoes to dry while hiking?

So the question that started all of this was not complicated. Why do you have to choose between hardware that holds up and a design that thinks?

Turning a Question Into a Product

At the start we had no warehouse, no factory partner, and no backpacks. We had a list of complaints and a rough sketch of what would fix them.

We learned quickly that a sketch is not a product. Somebody has to decide how thick the fabric is, which brand of zipper to use, how wide the webbing should be, where the hipbelt sits, what color the thread is, and what the pack ships in. Every one of those choices has a cost and a lead time. Most of them have a consequence you do not discover until the sample is in your hands.

And nobody mentioned the government regulations, testing requirements, labels and tags, import regulations, and tariffs….argh!  That is where the real work started.

Finding the Right Partner

We ended up working with an Outdoor Gear Co. in China with a man there named Steve, who has spent more time thinking about how packs are built than we ever will.

Over the course of two years of conversations, I got to know him and learned that "Manufactured in China" has become a phrase people use when they do not want to tell you anything. We did not want to pick an existing pack out of a catalog, print our logo on it, and pretend we had built something. We wanted a partner who would push back, and Steve did.

He was open to new ideas and eager for his team to integrate the features because they matter to me.  Upgrading the buckles is the perfect example.  I told him we had to have the best buckles there were, and told him my story.  He understood and that’s how the Adventured pack (and any other that we produce) has the Duraflex buckle.  When you feel it, you really feel like you’re using a quality part, knowing that it will not fail you when you need it.

Those many months of conversations, filled with education about fabrics, buckles, zippers and stitching lead to a sample product, constructed by a pro, that taught us something simple. Building a product is a negotiation between what you imagine and what can actually be sewn, hundreds of times over, without falling apart in year two.

What We Built

The result is the CMT001 Adventurer. It is a 48-liter pack in blaze orange, and it costs $249.95.

Both of those numbers are arguments.

$249.95 is what it costs to not cut the corner that stranded me on that switchback. Buckles, zippers, webbing, fabric, and stitching are where a cheap pack saves its money, and they are also the parts that fail badly. A torn pocket is annoying. A failed hipbelt ends your day. We spent the money there first. We’ve included Duraflex buckles, 210D ripstop nylon for lightweight strength, 1000D nylon on the bottom so sitting it down on rough granite is not a problem, YKK zippers that work every time without a struggle, and an integrated rain-cover that rounds it out.

48-liters is a deliberate middle. It holds enough for a three-day trip in the North Georgia mountains, with room for a bear canister. It is not so big that you will fill it with things you do not need just because the space is there. Bigger packs make you carry more, and we did not want to hand anyone that temptation.

Blaze orange is the choice people ask about most. Most packs like this come in gray, olive, or black. Those colors are picked so they will not bother anyone on a store shelf. But we hunt and hike the same ridges in the same seasons, and there is a real argument for being easy to see. And then there is the reason of Be Seen, Be Found.  Hikers are all the time wandering off the trail, or worse, and you see the headline: Rescuers Spotted a Bright Orange Backpack.

Don’t be that guy that doesn’t get found.

Receiving Our First 300

At some point you have to stop revising and place the order.

Three hundred units is a specific kind of commitment. It is small enough that we cannot hide behind volume. If the design is wrong, we own three hundred wrong backpacks. It is also large enough that the money is real. On top of that, a reorder takes about sixty five days, so we have to decide on the next run well before we know how this one sold.

After months of samples, revisions, and waiting, the boxes arrived.

There is a real difference between talking about a product, holding a sample, and standing in front of hundreds of finished packs stacked to the ceiling. At that point it stopped being an idea. 

This Is Only the Beginning

Three hundred packs is not a victory lap. It is a first run, and first runs exist to teach you things.

We want to know what we got wrong. Whether the hipbelt sits right on a body built differently than ours. Whether the color turns out to be a feature or just a novelty. Whether the thing we are proudest of is the thing nobody uses. Or do you think the Molle strips are a welcomed addition. All of that feedback goes into the second run, and with a sixty five day lead time, it goes in fast.

The CMT001 Adventurer, Founder's Edition, arrives in the Camping.Tools marketplace in September 2026. There are three hundred of them. When they are gone, the next run is more than two months out.

Thank you for being part of it. Please tell us what you think.