The Meeting

Just returned from The Meeting in Aspen this past weekend and it was everything we expect that weekend to be…

Amazing fall scenery in Aspen, fun parties, insightful discussions, productive meetings, and something really really fun courtesy of by Red Bull.

The fall scenery was in full effect with snow dusting the peaks and leaves in full fall display and we got to enjoy it with throttles pinned up the face of Ajax first thing after arriving on Friday. It’s a fun feeling racing around a mountain that you know so well in the summer. Looking at some of the runs it’s amazing that we can even ski them in the winter much less charge them the way we do… peering down S1 feels like you’re going to fall straight down to Spar.

Obviously a major topic of discussion was the Warren Miller Entertainment/Level1 Productions situation. Avoiding too much comment on the issue here I’ll just say that most of the industry was in agreement that there are probably better ways for WME to be spending time and money.

Saturday began with an American Supercamp session thanks to Red Bull where we got a chance to rip around a mini track and work on our moto fundamentals. Directly following a leg burning 100,002 laps on the Supercamp course at the bottom of Buttermilk we headed straight through town and up Smugglers passing dozens of nannies pushing strollers, house wives with lap dogs, hikers with ski poles, and bikers in spandex. The views were epic and the riding was fast and fun.

Straight off the trail we headed back to Buttermilk for session #2 and #3 of the meeting where we discussed the state of freeski competition and the AFP.

After a quick break we broke into the topic of the business of film making. The discussion centered around the sustainability, or lack thereof, of business models based solely around sales of action sports DVDs. It was an interesting discussion with representatives from all sides of the table joining in. We discussed the merits or team videos vs. independent films vs. special projects

After the official meetings were over we had a chance to sit down and talk some Helly Hansen and Aspen business and then on to the MSP premier at the Wheeler and a party at the Belly Up.

Sunday morning we made it a goal to be out early and as sad as it always is to leave Aspen we were excited to get into the desert. We unloaded and headed into the expansive Utah desert rolling through sage brush terrain and a perfect mix of fast and technical trails.

Add a stop in Grand Juction for some natural moto terrain park and you have a pretty great weekend.

Congrats to Riley and Katrina!!! and thanks to the entire Aspen crew!

The launch of “Business of Fun”

We have been brainstorming this event for years. A week ago it was finally time for a beta run. The general idea is to gather a panel of action sports experts from different fields of expertise and let it be known to college and high school age students that if you let your passions lead the way, there is probably a job that will make you happy.

We worked with the Colorado University Freeride Club which is the largest college club in the country to kick off this 1st event. Many industry partners kicked in time, promotions and product to also light a fire under the event. There was catered food, plenty of free Red Bull, TONS of give away product from all the involved companies (snowboard, bindings, outerwear, hoodies, magazine subscriptions, shoes, etc. etc.), and a poster signing by Chris Davenport.

The event started off with 4 short films and then the panel introduced themselves and explained how they were able to get their current jobs. The most consistent themes were “chasing what you want without ever giving up” and “being unique”. Got to love Steve “Stix” Nilsen and his stories and antidotes. He told a story about a potential hire telling him she was way to overwhelmed as her house burned down the night before. So he sent her a smoke detector. Persistence with humor.

Then things transitioned into a Q&A session with the students asking about everything from how to become a pro skier to how to sell photos to a magazine. The panel was amazing and provided insight from all different angles.

We look forward to the next Business of Fun and keeping the conversations going here in this blog and also on the Facebook site. Always open to any and all feedback.

The panel was:
Chris Davenport – Helly Hansen Pro athlete
Jake Knigge – Helly Hansen regional athlete and current CU student
Shay Willams – Freeskier Magazine photo editor
Mike Basher - Snowboard Magazine editor
Deric Gunsor - Aspen Ski CO marketing
Trent Bush – Brand Base (Technine, Nomis & Sound) co-founder
Steve Nilsen – Pabst Blue Ribbon marketing manager
Ian Fohrman – Helly Hansen sports marketing
Marily MacDonald – Outdoor Divas marketing manager
Frank Phillips (moderator) – The Public Works, LLC

Huge thanks to all the people that made this first event a huge success. Video of the event coming soon.

Lucky winner of an autographed copy of Chris Davenport’s book

Our newTrailball table seeing its first action

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Crested Butte & Aspen Meetings

Nothing makes work better than tying a lot of fun into it. We headed down to Crested Butte last Friday and hit the Rainbow Trail from Salida on the way. 100-mile single track that is a must-do for mt bike or moto.
From there it was on to Crested Butte where we met with the marketing folks at the resort.
We also spent some solid time with the whole crew at Match Stick Productions. They have just completed the edit of “In Deep” which will have it’s World Premier in Colorado instead of Canada for a change. Much easier to cross the border into Boulder rather than Vancouver.
We should have know when to call it complete day but dinner with the MSP folks transitioned into a serious Trailball game, many PBR’s and a late night.
This would have been OK if we didn’t need to be up at 6:30AM to do a extremely difficult 40+ mile moto ride to get to our meetings with Aspen Ski Company. Seemed as though the crew at Aspen were amused by our condition and smells coming off of us. Mike’s backpack opened at some point on the trip and literally lost his shorts so the day of meetings was spent in some tight red moto pants. Not that cool.
While in Aspen we also had a great meeting with Hamilton Sports where we will be doing some branding projects for Kastle Skis. Chris Davenport was nice enough to join us and offer up some opinions as he is the king of Kastle in the Aspen valley. 58 mile home and thinking that every day of business should be like that.
The last day of the trip we got Ian out for his first moto ride. Figured if he has worked with us this long he needed a bike so we could stop feeling guilty about leaving him behind. What was suppose to be a mellow ride had some hairball moments and ended up finishing at almost 50 miles. Ian killed it and I am sure we’ll be riding in his dust soon enough.

Trophies, Tornadoes, Beer and Biking

Crankworx, one of the biggest mountain bike festivals in the world, came to Colorado last week for the third consecutive year and we were asked to design and create the trophies.

We’ve been designing and building the trophies for Crankworx since the festival came to Colorado. The past two years we had incorporated laser cut, laser etched Plexiglas but this year we wanted to do it as eco-friendly as we possibly could.

The rockies have a huge issue with the pine beetle decimating the forests and leaving enormous swaths of red trees. There has been a push to figure out the best way to deal with these trees but as of now there doesn’t seem to be a huge demand. We decided to do our small part and utilize a few trees from our local forest.

We also decided to design the trophies around the concept of mountain bike features. In feature building there is an ethos around building out of natural materials from the forest and we decided to stick as closely to that as possible. We cut beetle kill from nearby woods, trailered it to the shop, and cut and milled it ourselves.

We came up with 3 different processes to mark the wood with the necessary branding and event/place call outs: silkscreen, laser etch, and hand burning.

We had never silkscreened on wood before and had never done anything with wood this fresh. Our first concern was that since the wood didn’t have time to cure that it would crack while it dried. After a little research we found Pentacryl an environmentally friendly wood stabilizer. It turns out the company had just relocated down the road from us several weeks prior and was more than happy to work with us.

Next we spent a day with Joe, a silk screening master living in Wheatridge. We spent the day learning the art of screening in Joe’s cramped tagged up garage dodging band equipment, art supplies, and a random mishmash of the usual garage/storage obstacles. It felt like the right place to be learning an art form popularized by Andy Warhol and used for band t-shirts and posters since the 60’s.

After a few hours of playing with the screens signs of a storm started to move in and within two minutes the barrage of wind and hail escalated to a deafening roar. Frank had forgotten his computer outsides and when he opened the door to save it a shotgun pattern of water and hail burst into the garage. We were all laughing hysterically until Frank tossed himself back into the garage with bloody legs from the hail and we all realized that we also had to brave the storm to make it back into the house. The storm past in less than 15 minutes and Joe was left with a broken bedroom window and a neighborhood that looked like an apocalyptic scene out of a Spielberg movie… other’s were left with worse:

Poor little guy never saw it coming.

Once we back in the mountains and sheltered from natural disasters we began the build process.

Then added some hand burned Trestles logos, lacquered everything, and packed up for delivery.

Then we filled up the truck with homemade waste oil biodiesel and headed out.

There was no question that we were bringing our bikes up to get some laps in after the delivery but we didn’t know until the night before that we would also be loaded down with PBR thanks to our good friend Stix.

Winter Park was fired up on the trophies and their share of the beers and we got to meet up with our good friend Kevin Kruse from Scott USA. Kevin was kind enough to let us borrow a few of the new whips and get some laps in the sickest bike park in Colorado!

Local eco materials, local vendors, a happy client, and some fun shredding… mission accomplished!

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New Portfolio Book!

80 pages, steel front and back cover and the printing looks beautiful.

HUGE thanks to Asuka book for the above and beyond customer service, quick turn times, and quality product!

Quote on cover under DVD:

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

-François-René de Chateaubriand

Public Works Client and Vendor Visits in Chicago

We just had a great trip out to Chicago.  Toured the 80/20 facility and got to spend some great time with the founders and marketing team.  Check out their product at 8020.net. The Public Works has been using their “industrial erector set” in everything from library furniture to skate ramps. Great to see where it comes from and meet the crew.
From their we were off to McDavid sports equipment. Once again a great crew. Also amazing to walk through a door and see 100,000+ sq feet of manufacturing going on. A little different view than the doom and gloom you hear on CNN about American manufacturing!
We also had a chance to stop through the Chicago office of DraftFCB, which is one of the largest creative agencies in the country. We’ve done an assortment of work for them over the years and it was good to check out their massive Chicago set-up.
In the mix of all this Frank was also able to pick up his new Jetta TDI wagon. It will soon have Public Works produced bio-diesel pumping through it. Seems like a solid car as we proceeded to put about 3000 miles on it within 48 hours. One big fat raccoon was almost a victim but probably only lost a couple hairs off its tail.

MiniBook

We’re proud of our portfolio book. It’s big, shiny, and heavy… but it’s also expensive.

When we show it off we inevitably get asked if we can give them away and, as much as we’d like our work to be on display everywhere, it’s just too expensive.

With a couple of weeks left before SIA (the snow industry tradeshow in Vegas) we decided to design a take-down of the book that we could feel good about giving away.

This is what we came up with… It’s got a laser cut, laser etched bamboo logo, it’s bound with post consumer recycled material, and it includes a business card and portfolio DVD (with photo slide shows and plenty of video). The unit cost ended up right around $5 but the best part is that we can make them in small runs and cater the content to our specific needs… ie. this one is snow industry heavy because it was designed for SIA but we also have a engineering/prototyping/fabrication version as well and we can easily make brand/pitch specific mini books.

Here are some grainy low res point and shoot snapshots (I thought about putting some production value into the presentation on the blog but figured you’d get the point this way).

If you’d like one just drop us a comment and we’ll drop it in the mail.

Inside Front (click to make bigger)

Inside Back (click to make bigger)

Sneak Peak: Portfolio Book

Our portfolio book has been a huge asset to us over the last few years but it was beginning to feel a bit outdated and in need of an upgrade.

We’ve been working hard on the massive project of overhauling the book for quite awhile now and figured we’d release a sneak peak of some of the progress.

The original book is 40 glossy pages of our design, engineering, prototyping, photography, and marketing capabilities bound with a laser cut metal front and back cover. We are close to finishing the upgrade to 80 pages including a ton of new projects and a full photography portfolio section.

Here are the intro pages from the photo section. Please let us know what you think.

PowWow

The Public Works co-founder Mike Arzt sat on the panel at the PowWow in Whistler this Saturday and discussed our involvement with Helly Hansen, our bio-diesel processor project with Mark Abma, and lent his expert insight on a variety of topics.

The PowWow was an invitation-only mountain sport marketing summit that Origin co-presents during the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival provided a unique opportunity for industry leaders to come together to discuss marketing trends and challenges. The day-long symposium combined with evening outings to some of the Festival’s hottest events, made for a great couple of days.

Josh’s [Spear] presentation was followed by a panel discussion entitled “Branding in Snow Sports: How to stay plugged in to a changing marketplace” featuring Whistler Blackcomb’s president and COO Dave Brownlie, Spy Optics VP of Marketing Fran Richards, North Face Canada Marketing Manager Corey Stecker, and the Public Works partner Mike Arzt.

1Step Launch Party

The Public Works team just returned from a trip to Whistler for the Telus Festival, the 1Step launch party, and a biodiesel processor project (more on that prjoect coming soon).

1Step is Mark Abma’s foundation.   The goal of 1STEP is to find and communicate practical ways for winter sports communities worldwide to practice their sport with sustainability in mind. Whether it’s at a resort or in the backcountry, 1STEP is dedicated to finding ways of making sure that the environment isn’t harmed and that local economies and communities are strengthened in the pursuit of winter play.

The foundation collaborates with industry sponsors, resorts, athletes, skiers, snowboarders and sledders as well as members of academia, government and non-governmental organizations to find innovative solutions to climate change that mean we can enjoy our winters now and in the future.

The Launch party was held in Blake Jorgenson’s gallery in the Whistler village.  The room was full of friends, family, and industry icons.  Drinks flowed as everyone mingled, put in thier bids for the silent auction, and enjoyed amazing hors d’ oeuvres.  The live auction was lively and fun with a couple of good battles over a 4 day Whistler vaction package, a pair of Abma’s new Shogun Salomon skis, and a dinner with the chef of the night.

More info at http://www.1stepnow.org

Here are a few photos from the night: