Granite Gear — Episode 16

Brand Junkies - Rethink Creative Group

David interviews the Senior Designer at Granite Gear about their approach to creating raging fans. Michael Meyer shares how they generate word of mouth from their users in a variety of different ways.

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Show Notes

David: Yo, yo, yo, what is up, Junkies? If you have ever wondered how to get people to share your product or service via word of mouth, this podcast episode is for you. I'm sitting down with the senior director of design, from Granite Gear and he's going to share the tips, tricks and secrets that they use to get people to share their products via word of mouth. I'm telling you, you're going to love this podcast. Without further a do, Michael Meyer. [Hey 00:00:34], welcome to another episode of [Brand 00:00:35] Junkies, today I'm joined by Michael Meyer of Granite Gear. Michael, how are you doing today, man?

Michael: Good, David. How you doing?

David: Doing great. Michael, why don't you tell us a little bit about Granite Gear and how you guys got here, how you guys started and what you guys are up to.

Michael: Absolutely. Granite Gear is an outdoor brand. We're a [Pack 00:00:58] brand. That's who we are and what we do best. We're founded in Minnesota in 1986. Currently headquartered in Two Harbors, Minnesota. It's about a 30-minute drive North of Duluth. That's where a lot of the magic happens on the product side. This brand was essentially founded in that search for better gear. Why can't gear be solid? Why can't gear be more functional? Why can't gear be more reliable? Those sorts of things. This year is our 30th anniversary, and we're growing, right now, at a great rate. Just in a nutshell a little bit of who we are. Like I said earlier, we're a pack brand. Our packs have been to the ends of the earth, North Pole, South Pole, top of Everest, top of Denali. We've been in every major trail on the planet. We've won multiple major awards over the years from publications like Outside Magazine, BackPack Magazine, et cetera.

We always tell our consumers not so much to use those reviews, but just to try the product because the product truly speaks for itself.

David: That's awesome. I love that. I love that. What has been your key ... You said you guys have grown a lot recently. What has been your go-to for how to create raging fans of the brand. I mean, that's always a challenge and everybody always does those things differently.

Michael: Absolutely. The biggest thing I can attribute to our success has been word of mouth. Word of mouth in the outdoor industry, the thru-hiker community, backpacking circles, that has really spread the word and helped us grow to create those raging fans. At Granite Gear, we create outdoor products to allow consumers basically to keep their focus off the gear and more so on the outdoors. When a product fails, for example, on an expedition or a weekend warrior camping trip, or even an urban community setting, it takes a consumer's focus off the entire reason why they went outdoors to begin with.

We see so many frustrated consumers and they're frustrated with the poor quality of their gear. We believe that our gear allows consumers to take their focus off the gear that they carry and put it back into the outdoors, the great outdoors. I say great outdoors because the outdoors are great and they're beautiful. Wee want to keep it that way. That's our purpose. We feel that our consumers believe what we believe. They believe in the highest quality products. Products that function with no nonsense. We're not a gimmick company. We design thoughtful gear and we design it around the consumer. Function comes first. Outside of carrying your gear, comfort is key. Massive, massive, for myself being on the design side, a massive amount of thought is put into designing and developing Granite Gear products.

We feel that our customers and consumers believe in what we believe in again, and we believe that our gear should adapt to the conditions of the consumer. It should be a gear that lasts. Out gear does this because we design our gear to do this. We wear test the crap out of our gear to ensure its durability. We use testing labs, of course, to test tear strength, the abrasion resistance and that sort of thing, but we more so test our gear in its natural habitat. We've got a small team of professional athletes that take our gear to the ends of the earth again, and we've got a small team of brand ambassadors that are kind of more on amateur level that do the same.

All the people that work at our company are outdoor, and we take our packs out and test them, and further more we take all of our customer feedback into consideration. Gear reviews, reviews on our website, products that get reviews on other companies or each others' website, we use all that stuff. We boil it down in that constant need and want to make our gear better and better every generation that we come out with it.

We stand behind what we do at the same time. Our gear's back buyer, we call it Rock Solid Lifetime Warranty. Any time there's an issue, we'll repair the gear or replace it. Real quickly just talk about couple cool things that have happened in the past year that have helped create some raging fans for the brand is we believe in protecting the environment, so we deal with a lot of different causes where we donate packs, we donate funds, we donate whatever it is, we donate time. We do trail clean up. We partnered with a small group of guys called Packing It Out, I don't know if you've ever heard of them.

It's fluctuated between a two-man team and a three-man team. Right now it's couple guys, Seth and Paul, they hiked the AT in 2015 and not only did they complete the entire AT hike which is awesome in its own, but they picked up every piece of trash that they came across on their entire hike.

David: Wow.

Michael: Then, they packed out almost 1100 pounds of trash that year. We actually met these guys coincidentally AT trail days in 2015, and they were carrying our packs. We're like "Hey guys, thanks for carrying our packs." We didn't know anything about them. We started talking to them and they started to tell us what they're doing and we're like "wow guys, this is insane. Who's your sponsor, who's your biggest sponsor?" They're like "We don't have any sponsors. We carry your packs because they work. We love your packs and we don't have sponsors." We're like "Oh my gosh, we got to talk to these guys." We talked to them more and more and more, kind of fell in love with each other as far as what we believe in.

We struck up a partnership with them. This year, 2016, they hiked the PCT. They packed out over 700 pounds of trash on the and they just finished that within the last 2 or 3 weeks. Stuff like that. I think that a lot of consumers, there are a lot of brands out there that make product, and there's a lot of different things you can do to product to help differentiate and set your product apart, but I think when it comes down to it a lot of consumers are looking to believe in what brands believe in. That sort of thing.

Anyways, I'm rambling out here.

David: No, you're great. You're great. I knew this, because I've checked out your packs before and I know a bit about you guys, but has there even been a way that you've tried to foster that just word of mouth or have you just found that it happens organically? How do you quantify that and help it move along?

Michael: Yeah. Word of mouth is kind of tough. We believe that our gear, like I said, is function first. We use the highest quality materials, hardwares, that sort of thing on our products. People, for one reason or another, have come across our product, given it a shot and tried it out, and said "oh my gosh, this works." From there, they've had friends and family even, asking them "Hey, what kind of pack is that?" "What kind of gear is that?" Or "I'm going on this trip, I'm going on this two-week hiking trip up in the Boundary Waters or canoe trip up in the Boundary Waters in [Rural 00:10:36] Minnesota, which pack should I take?" They'll walk into a local retailer, and they may not see our packs because you may come across the occasional store that doesn't carry a Granite Gear pack. They say "we sought out Granite Gear, find a Granite Gear pack because it works."

Again, I don't know if that answers your questions. It's difficult. Word of mouth and good and bad, and bad only I say because it's difficult, but when you can get that true following, for people to say "oh my gosh, try out this product," that is as good as gold. That is really, really valuable.

David: You talked about earlier how you use customer feedback through reviews and different interactions, I'm guessing through social media and then people contacting you through the site, and whatever, to kind of help guide you and your product development. Take me through the process on that. How do you determine this is a good review or this is good feedback versus this is just garbage and something that's not helpful. What's the process for weeding out the bad and keeping the good?

Michael: I love feedback. Especially being on the design and development side, there's really no bad feedback. There's definitely more constructive feedback. Constructive feedback is so much more valuable. You should never be afraid of reading a review that somebody's complaining about your product because that's something that you can take and put value to, and then incorporate a running change or course correct, a product in its next round of production, so on and so forth. We read every review that we get. We get reviews various different ways. Sometimes we get direct e-mails. Somebody will search me out and find who I am whether it be on LinkedIn or what, and send me a direct e-mail and say "Hey, Michael. I was carrying your pack and the shoulder strap blew out." Or "There's a hole in the fabric at the bottom of the pack."

Not only do we fix that problem for that person, but we also jot down notes and keep track of are we seeing consistencies in defects? Is that on a factory level or is that on the design level? Is that a craftsmanship issue that I can go back to my factory and say "Hey, while you were in production, this error happened. It needs to be corrected immediately." Or is it something that "Hey, when we designed this, we crossed all of our Ts and dotted all of our Is, but we missed something. It does happen from time to time. It's unfortunate when it happens, but when somebody calls that out, your first reaction is "oh man, I don't want to hear this." I did everything I could to make this the best product possible, but you can never do too much.

Hearing feedback from customers is super important, and we absolutely use that. That's how we perfect our products through generation though generations. One of our flagship products right now is our ultra light thru-hiker pack. It's called The Crown. Crown V.C. 60. It's a cult classic for us. It's got a following in the thru-hiker community. You hike the AT, and there's a really really good chance that you're going to see a Granite Gear Crown pack. We, over the course of the past 2 years, this product has been out for 4, 5, 6 years now. Over the course of the past 2 years, we have redesigned and redeveloped the next generation of The Crown. It's called The Crown 2 and it's actually coming out in Spring of 2017. We corrected issues on the Crown 1 that we had heard over and over again.

Just to give you a quick example, our side pockets on the crown are stretch mesh, and it's a very durable stretch mesh fabric, but we found over time that on those side pockets when you're bushwhacking or when you're walking through, you're in trail that are rough with tree branches and that sort of thing, over time, those pockets weren't wearing properly. We then, on the Crown 2, we changed that material to a stretch woven fabric, which is 3 times as durable. It's always difficult on this thru-hiking packs because they always have to be ultra light. Every single gram is accounted for, but we were able to make that upgrade, as well as many other important upgrades, just to further improve and perfect our products.

We do get, on occasion, we get the nonconstructive feedback. "Worst effin back I've ever carried in my entire life." From time to time we that kind of stuff. I always wonder out of what [vain 00:16:36] that came out off from that consumer, they're just so angry. It could have been a 1 off defect. Out of 10,000, 1 piece of the production line, human error that the factory, something wasn't sown right and unfortunately it got through QC which doesn't typically happen but it can happen from time to time because it is human error. We get a review here and there that are like that.

You take those in and you chuckle at them a little bit. At the end of the day, it's still constructive. You still have a plan of action to improve and make sure that those issues don't happen moving forward. That's taking into consideration that the consumer knows how to use the product. Sometimes we have consumers that they'll use our pack for something completely different.

We had a customer take our Vapor Flatbed pack which it carries a bear canister, and you put all these food in the bear canister, and so it's air tight so when you go deep woods, hiking, and camping, the bear doesn't smell the food and it keeps you safe. This person used this pack for hunting, for carrying massive animal carcasses. It actually ended up working, [legitly 00:18:07] for what he wanted it to do, but he claimed, "it's not as comfortable as I thought it was." How heavy are these carcasses? "70, 80, 90 pounds." We're like "Well sir, the pack is only rated to carry 40-45 pounds. You're nearly doubling the load rating. It's still carrying it?" "Yeah it's still carrying it, it's just not as comfortable as I thought it was going to be." We're like "Well we really apologize, at least it's working for you but it's not its intended use." We get funny stuff like that from time to time.

David: That's awesome. Have you guys taken a branding position just to say "Hey, we're going to focus on fostering that word of mouth," or are you guys just saying "We're going to focus on the product and meeting our customer's needs as best we can and then we just see that that word of mouth happens naturally because we're producing such a high-quality product?"

Michael: They kind of go hand in hand, especially lately as we are growing as a brand. We will constantly focus on a product. That's truly where our focus has been and is, and will continue to be, and that organic word of mouth is so valuable. What we've been doing over the course of the past year or two is trying to spread the word. Trying to tell our stories. Trying to let people know what we believe in as a brand and further spreading that word of mouth. We feel that we started doing this, because we feel like that is going to help us grow further as a company, and it's proven true. Which is why we are growing at a reasonable rate, and we're happy with where we're at as a brand and we're happy with what we do, and we're happy with our success. We just really want to get our packs in the hands of more consumers, in the hands of more consumers that believe in what we believe in.

We feel like just doing that alone will help to grow our brand significantly.

David: Awesome. Awesome. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Michael: Absolutely.

David: I know that our listeners are going to love it. If they want to check out Granite Gear more, where would they go to do that?

Michael: Yeah, please please go to granitegear.com. It's all one word. Granitegear.com. You can also check us out on our social channels. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The handle's @Granitegear, as well as we have a blog journal that launched in early September. We tell a lot of great stories from true, legit consumers that have used our product. That's www.granitegear.com/journal. Yeah, trying to think of what else, but you can find us at your local mom and pop outdoor shop as well. I appreciate the time, David. It's been a lot of fun.

David: Good, man, good.

All right, the thing that I loved about this particular interview was that Michael really shared his pursuit and passion of allowing his users to dictate his product. This is a really true and great way to build your brand, is allowing your feedback, your user feedback to then give you the insights and the tools to build a better product or service. When is the last time you took the temperature of your customers or clients to figure out what they actually love? What I mean by that is, what was their review of it? Michael talked a lot about that, and I thought that his perspective of saying every review is a good review. Sure there are going to be just complete asshole who just say "this is the worst bag I've ever seen, this is worst beer I've ever tasted," and there's no value there.

However, I think he brings up an excellent point to say, there are going to be some people that say "hey, you have a serious issue here. I'm experiencing this with your product or service, maybe you could help me out." That feedback is absolutely vital and will help grow your business. It's made me, honestly, evaluate how we get feedback from our clients in our creative and figured out how are we going to better serve them by getting a constant feedback loop of that critique that's really making us better, not trying to be too overly critical of what we're trying to accomplish.

Hey, if you've enjoyed this show or you're enjoying Brand Junkies overall as a podcast series, please, please do us a favor, go review and rate us on iTunes. It really helps to grow the show. As always, you can find us @rethinkcreate on Twitter or Rethink Creative Group on Facebook, and rethink.agency on the web. Love you so much, junkies, thanks for listening. Peace.