20 Years of Adventure: How Tom Dempsey and SylvanSport are Revolutionizing Camping
This lesson is an episode of Exploration Local.
Listen to the episodeWhat you'll get
Tom Dempsey of Brevard traces his path from designing pop-up campers at Coleman and kayaks at Perception, through co-founding Liquid Logic Kayaks, to founding SylvanSport in 2004, where he rebuilt the pop-up camper from the wheels up as a light trailer that carries bikes and kayaks. In this friendly 20th-anniversary interview he says buyers were slow to understand the product and that keeping a factory open through 2008 and COVID meant solving one day's problems at a time, which makes it the WNC pick for a designer who wants to turn their own outdoor habits into a manufacturing company.
Do this week
Spend a full day using your product, or the closest one you can get, the way your customer does, and list three things that frustrated you that a better design could remove.