Tom Routh: At the Root of Innovation | Hypebeast

Having understood the back-end side of things at Arc’teryx, I think you’ve answered a question many have asked regarding exactly why is Arc’teryx the leading purveyor in performance outdoor goods. It seems as though having developed such a solid framework through Arc’ effectively paved the way to the foundation of FYi Design. Going from Arc’ to creating FYi, was it a smooth progression or were there any unseen obstacles starting your own brand that weren’t apparent until FYi started gaining traction and steam?

I really founded FYI for a couple of (big) reasons. Number one, I felt to do my best work, I needed to control my creative process and environment and number two, I needed to realign my lifestyle. During my latter years at Arc’, I noticed that it became increasingly difficult to be creative during business hours. 9 to 5 was consumed with meetings, correspondence and addressing production problems among other things. There were too many distractions to be creative. I ended up setting up a mini-studio in my downtown loft so I could go home and do the creative part of my job at night. After awhile I realized I didn’t use Arc’s infrastructure to do my job. I’ve always owned my own tools and machines, so the brand at that point was just an avenue to take my work to market. After 10 years of city life which included 5 years with CirqueWorks in Portland and 5 years with Arc’ in Vancouver, I was getting spun out. I grew up in the mountains and my outdoor lifestyle is what led me into design. Yet design was taking me away from my outdoor lifestyle. It started to feel wrong to be designing technical outdoor gear in an urban environment. I think I started to have an identity crisis of sorts. That’s when I decided to flip the script and start FYi. I sold my downtown loft, bought a dirtbike and a snowmobile and proceeded to move to right outside Pemberton, British Columbia (a town with a population of 3,000 people)! I made a fundamental decision that design needed to support my lifestyle even if that meant taking a big pay cut.

I think the biggest challenge was running the studio from a rural location. It was a risk. I wasn’t sure it would work. In the city you can go find anything you need anytime. Out here, you need to have EVERYTHING in-house and prepared accordingly. You can’t have a project stall because you’re missing a zipper or don’t have the right tool. We had to set up the studio with everything the factories have, which is both expensive and takes a lot of time and effort to get up and running. In the beginning it was all the small stuff that you take for granted that was challenging. No cell service, no FedEx, no satellite Internet, that kind of stuff. Now the studio is super dialed and running smooth.

I think it’s interesting how some aspects of your job with Arc’ dealing with managerial and logistics had prevented you from being fully dedicated to the creative aspect. I’m not sure if you’ve heard but Google encourages its employees to take 20% of their work time to work on projects that interest them (Google Innovation Time Off) which has obviously paid dividends with services such as Gmail, Google News and AdSense all emanating from this concept. Could you go into detail about the FYi Compound, do you maintain a residence there as well or do all of you live in Pemberton and commute?

The FYi compound is currently on 11 acres about 30 minutes outside of Pemberton. We’re literally at the end of the road. Susanna and I have our house on the property and the rest of the crew is commuting out from Pemberton. The actual design studio is 2,500 square feet. That includes 1,100 square feet of office space and the rest is the workshop full of machines. Then we have another 1,400 square feet of shop to support the “lifestyle” aspect of our program, that houses snowboard gear, snowmobiles, dirt bikes etc. Although this might all change soon, as we’re starting to contemplate designing and building a new studio in Pemberton (moving into the big city haha!). So we just listed the Birken compound for sale.