Tom Routh: At the Root of Innovation | Hypebeast

Being some-what secluded in interior British Columbia, has does this factor into your inspirations. Do you travel often on “inspiration trips” around the world or does your backyard provide ample amounts of ideas and inspirations?

We travel quite a lot, so everything balances out. We have a lot of exposure to interesting things during trips, and then when we come back to the studio, we have total focus on what we are working on. Inspiration comes from different places. We generally don’t follow what direct competitors are doing as it tends to influence your own thought process too much, we prefer to take an original approach to specific problems, which tends to create a unique solution. We also get a lot of inspiration from things happening in unrelated industries, like car design, architecture or maybe furniture design. Many times inspiration comes from raw materials as well, you see something new and you know what to do with it right away. Although it’s different for different projects. With clients like AETHER or SOPH. we have to dig deeper into who the customer is and what the intention of the product is for. We’re not just designing for ourselves, we have to get into the head of that customer. With BURTON [ak] we are essentially designing for our own lifestyle, so everything comes very naturally. Pemberton itself really represents the [ak] lifestyle, so we’re completely submersed in it on a daily basis. We’re building gear to function in our immediate surroundings.

When you mention trying to design for different people and inevitably different demographics, do you have a certain process in helping to align yourself with their thoughts and ideas. Or is there really nothing that beats good ol’ fashioned face-to-face communication? Is it difficult to keep ideas separate amongst your clients like Burton [ak], AETHER and SOPH.?

Face to face communication is crucial, we need to understand who the core customer is, what they value, and how they see things. Having grown up in the outdoor / mountain environment, you see things a certain way, you’re conditioned to your perspective. Sometimes we get surprised, so it’s important to confirm our direction aligns with the end user. For example a few years back we designed a technical travel jacket for Tumi. At the beginning of the process I thought they would love the GORE WTT, which is 3L laminate with a brushed poly interior and seam-tape. I thought they would like it as it was cleaner than a hanging liner and the interior was “friendly” for a 3L laminate. When I tabled the jacket, and turned it inside out to explain the construction, everybody cringed and thought the interior construction looked crude and unfinished… it was like putting on a different pair of glasses! I immediately remembered seeing the first GORE-TEX seam-taped 3L jacket as a kid and I remember reacting the same way to the interior. It’s just that I got conditioned to how 3L construction looks and feels. That was a bit of an epiphany. Once you put their glasses on, you can see and understand the customers perspective and design accordingly.

Yes, we have to keep a bit of a creative firewall between different clients and projects. Especially when there is R&D and intellectual property involved, as there often is. We keep all our projects confidential. We really focus on defining specific design elements and a “visual language” that’s unique to each program. Generally it’s not a problem as different projects tend to take on a life of their own and development heads different directions. Sometimes there is even a benefit, as something you learned from one project leads to something else new on another project. Ideas leap frog each other. A new construction technique in one category, can lead to something totally different when applied to another category.