Transcript
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Joining me as I sit down with Tom Dempsey, the visionary founder of Sylvan Sport, to celebrate 20 years of groundbreaking innovation in outdoor recreation.
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Tom's journey from the Appalachian Trail to the forefront of the outdoor industry is filled with passion and creativity.
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We'll explore how Sylvan Sport's trailers, renowned for their lightweight, versatility and unique design elements, are redefining the modern camping experience, and we'll dive into the evolution of their product line, from the iconic Go trailer to the spacious Vast to the versatile Loft series.
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And we'll talk about camping gear, accessories and more.
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We'll also hear about the challenges and triumphs along the way.
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Tom also shares insights on the rise of Western North Carolina as a hub for outdoor adventure and the vital role of community and family in driving Sildon Sports' mission.
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Outdoor adventure and the vital role of community and family in driving Sylvan Sports' mission.
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This episode is a tribute to the power of innovation and the enduring impact of outdoor experiences and to Sylvan Sports' unwavering commitment to enhancing the way that we connect with nature.
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You're really going to love this episode.
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I can't wait for you to hear it.
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I'll see you on the other side.
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I'll see you on the other side.
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You're listening to Exploration Local, a podcast designed to explore and celebrate the people and places that make the Blue Ridge and Southern Appalachian Mountains special and unique.
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My name is Mike Andrus, the host of Exploration Local.
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Join us on our journey to explore these mountains and discover how they fuel a spirit of adventure.
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We encourage you to wander far, but explore local.
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Let's go.
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Well, tom, I can't thank you enough for making the drive over from Cedar Mountain over here to Hendersonville.
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I can't wait to dive in and talk all things Sylvan Sport, especially as you all are entering your 20th anniversary.
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Thank you for making the drive and thanks for being on the show.
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Oh, I'm happy to be here, Mike.
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Thank you so much for the opportunity.
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Absolutely, tom.
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You have been a guiding light and really an undeniable influence in the outdoor industry just in general.
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And so what I would love to do for our listeners that may not be right here in Western North Carolina and they're really literally all over the United States, and so they may not know who Sylvan Sport is, they may not know who Tom Dempsey is, but they're going to know by the time we get done with this episode today.
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But to set the stage, I would love to just kind of talk a little bit about your background.
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You were doing things far before you got to Sylvan Sport.
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So let's start there, let's talk a little bit about your background, a little bit of the history, and then we'll talk about what got you into Sylvan Sport.
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I grew up in sight distance from the Appalachian Trail in central Pennsylvania Well, eastern east central Pennsylvania over there where the AT runs.
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So as a young kid I was always up there and trying to lure my friends to go up there with me every chance I got and, you know, fell in love with the outdoors at an early age.
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I went to Auburn University, studied industrial design and really have enjoyed the last 30 some odd years of applying industrial design to the outdoor gear world, so it's I can't think of a more fun way to have spent all these years.
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I started my professional career with the Coleman company my first real job after college as a product designer, and I was working on Coleman pop-up campers at the time and I remember thinking this is a product that I personally wouldn't really need or use, but it was an amazing company and phenomenal people and I learned so much and really never looked back from that first opportunity.
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Our very first camper as a family was in 1997.
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I think it was an eight-foot box.
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It was a Coleman camper.
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We happened to put an air conditioning unit on it.
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That was our very first family experiences in that Coleman camper.
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So we had it for many, many years.
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That's awesome.
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Love to hear it, yeah.
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So then you transitioned into sort of the kayak world.
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Was did you go right from that into perception kayaks?
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Well, while I was working at Coleman.
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So again you know first job out of college, early twenties.
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So again you know first job out of college, early 20s.
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I'm in Somerset Pennsylvania, which was a beautiful small town in western Pennsylvania.
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I kind of had a life experience that taught me how short life can be and that you have to do things now, and the result of that was I always, I think, my DNA I'm an entrepreneur.
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So, despite the fact that I really enjoyed my job there, I left on great terms.
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My boss actually invested in the company I was leaving to start, which was a pretty good sign, and so I tried my first hand at being an entrepreneur, moved to Huntsville, alabama, with a college friend.
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We started a company to design some very innovative medical products that we had conceived while we were in school.
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That was a tremendous experience.
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I think we spent about five years from startup to when we sold this company, and it was, you know, the equivalent of like five MBAs.
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Wow.
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And just a tremendous amount of experience.
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We didn't know anything when we started about running a business and learned it all on the fly.
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You know, classic school of hard knocks.
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Sometimes that's the best.
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It ended up being so great and then really from that experience, I considered myself unemployable because I thought, you know, I am now fully bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.
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I don't think I can work at a regular job again and be as excited.
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But lo and behold, bill Masters, who owned Perception Kayaks, offered a job to me to lead his design team, which honestly, was too good of an opportunity to turn down.
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So I moved to South Carolina, the upstate of South Carolina, and dug in and had a couple of more phenomenal, great years of fun with the team at Perception and getting to lead the way on designing dozens and dozens of new kayaks and accessories and gear and components and really a blast.
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And that led to business changes.
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At that, bill sold the company.
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It led to kind of a wide open opportunity to start another kayak company.
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So why not combine that early entrepreneurial drive with that wide open opportunity to start another kayak company?
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So why not combine that early entrepreneurial drive with that wide open opportunity?
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And that led to the creation of Liquid Logic Kayaks.
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And I did that for about four years and then really saw this opportunity.
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That was this crossroads that became Sylvan Sports.
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So that's what we'll dive into here more in a moment.
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We were talking when we were doing the tour, right about the time that you were launching Liquid Logic Kayaks.
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I remember telling you the story of being at the Quarry Rapid on the NOC and just kind of parked on the side of the road and just wondered these unbranded boats, what in the world was this?
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And you had pointed to a boat in the corner and yeah, it was blue.
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I don't know what the name of the color blue was, but that definitely got my attention then and you know, interestingly, we'll definitely want to jump into the Sylvan Sport In 2013,.
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When we moved here as a family, I remember being in Brevard and one of your trailers went by.
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Somebody was towing one of your trailers.
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It was the most unique thing that I had seen at the time.
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Well, that's really cool to hear that you saw an early Sylvan Sport go on the road.
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Yeah, it's funny.
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That makes me think I was in the earliest of Liquid Logic days.
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Woody Calloway and I were on our way somewhere I can't remember, but we were riding in the car together and we saw a Liquid Logic boat on top of someone else's car, and it was the first person we didn't know.
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Really, and so we were like it's somebody we don't know, that's great.
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First person we didn't know, and so we were like it's somebody we don't know.
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They bought one of our boats because everybody prior to that, you know, actually was were folks that we knew Right, and so that was kind of a milestone moment.
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And same at Sylvan Sport, when we first saw the, or when we saw the first go on the road that we didn't know the owner.
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We're like, oh my gosh, a stranger has bought one of our products.
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It's such a great feeling.
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That's awesome.
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It's like, okay, we must be on the right track.
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Yeah, yeah, that's great.
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Well, it definitely is unique and it grabs your attention, and so let's kind of dive into that a little bit.
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Let's talk about some of the products that you have, and you do have this a couple of new products that have launched just as recent as a couple of weeks ago, I guess officially, you did a live stream and also had people at the plant.
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But, yeah, let's unpack the products that you have.
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What makes up the products?
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The camping products at Sylvan Sport.
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Well, it all started with the Sylvan Sport Go and around the year, I guess, 2004, 20 years ago I saw this opportunity where the adventure sports world and active sports world kayakers, mountain bikers, you know folks that were participating in active sports were looking for something to camp in and carry gear.
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I mean, the RV industry didn't have anything that appealed to you know kind of our crowd.
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So I thought, what if we reinvent the pop-up camper and start literally from the wheels up?
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So part number 00001 of the go are the actual wheels.
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Wow.
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And at the time there weren't any wheels available off the shelf that met our needs, so we actually designed our first original wheels from scratch which is crazy, I mean who does that.
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So, again, more lessons learned.
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The overall reasoning behind it, though, was, you know, again, to reinvent the entry-level RV and make it something I used to say take it out of the RV dealership and put it in the REI world, so something along the lines that would be appealing to gear savvy cyclists and boaters and that type of customer, and so one of the primary needs was to carry lots of stuff, because, at the time, rvers, we did a lot of detailed homework.
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85% of people that went camping were camping in order to facilitate some other activity.
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They weren't just going to sit around in a camper.
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So we dug in and found out what do you want to bring, and it was bikes and kayaks, and so we created this product that was versatile and it could carry lots of gear.
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It could be really comfortable at your destination.
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It addressed a lot of the complexities that came along with an RV and got rid of them.
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You know, seeking sort of an ultra simplicity.
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It was really well made, so it didn't have the quality or fear of breaking down type issues you know that you would have.
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So, really, just looking at all the negatives that come along with towing a trailer and trying to design them out of it using our good design skills background.
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So what we ended up with at Sylvan Sport was the Go Camper flagship first product, and some of its design characteristics were that it was multifunctional, so one product wasn't going to sit in your yard for 11 and a half months of the year waiting for your two-week vacation.
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It was going to fit into your yard for 11 and a half months of the year waiting for your two-week vacation.
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It was going to fit into your weekly life and be much more useful, and that philosophy is one of the tenets that have carried through all of our products since the Go.
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So over the 20 years we've added a lot of accessories and components to the Go.
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We then came out with the Go Easy, which was a smaller, really convenient gear hauling trailer.
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Recently we came out with a vast travel trailer.
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We've got lots of products that go along with kind of the camping lifestyle, from camp kitchens to sleeping systems and lighting and other shelters like our Gozebo.
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But the thread that winds through all of our products are that in an age now where you can borrow or rent things for occasional use pretty easily, what makes a product compelling enough to actually want to own it?
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And that is it's got to truly provide a lot of utility and function on a frequent basis, and that's one of our hallmarks.
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Function on a frequent basis, and that's one of our hallmarks.
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Another one is if we're going to use resources to create an artifact, if you will, we want to put those resources to the highest use.
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We want to make them last as long as possible.
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I mean, there's go owners who have given their goes to the next generation and their family like pass them down.
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So, it's also super gratifying to have seen our earliest goes that we produced back in the factory, where the owners come by for a visit, and these you know 18 year old goes are still functioning perfectly well, so that's something where we're proud of it.
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It sometimes can make for a difficult business when we had one customer that said you know you'd sell a lot more of these things if they didn't last forever.
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So we get it, but I don't think we would be happy with any alternative.
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No, it seems to kind of fit with the ethos of building something that's sustainable and something that, as you said, it has multi-uses and multi-functions.
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This is really, really interesting because you're getting this camping trailer but then you also have it as a utility where you have on there.
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You can fit one washer, you can fit two washers, you could fit all of these things that are everyday life, and ever since Monday I haven't really kind of been able to get that out of my head.
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And it really does make a lot of sense if it's hauling mulch, if it's just hauling a motorcycle hauling gear, just hauling anything that, as you say, I might not be camping every weekend, but I could probably be using this trailer.
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You nailed it.
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I mean, we used to say we turn a Prius into a pickup truck because you know it does.
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It allows the smallest of tow vehicle to turn into a utility vehicle as needed and then go back to being a nice fuel efficient tow vehicle.
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So I think when we look at the span of the 20 years we've definitely changed the trajectory of the RV industry.
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Early on I think maybe we were a little too ahead of the curve where people didn't really understand what we were doing and why.
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Peter Metcalf's a good friend of mine.
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He's the founder of Black Diamond Equipment out in Utah.
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A good friend of mine, he's the founder of Black Diamond Equipment out in Utah and when we introduced the Go to the public at a show out there he was one of the first people to see it and he told me.
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He described his reaction to me and I'll never forget it.
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He said that reminds me of the old buffalo hunter out on the plains who saw a buffalo at a thousand yards and he, you know, put his finger up in the air and threw some dirt and sampled it and then aimed his rifle, you know, like seven degrees up and three degrees to the left, and pulled the trigger and then set the rifle down and then watch the buffalo fall.
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He he's like that's how far ahead of the curve you guys are on this thing.
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Wow, that's poignant.
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He's like that is a thousand-yard rifle shot out into the future.
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So at the time I thought, wow, that's a cool thing to say.
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But then over the years I understood what the business reality of that meant and it meant that it took a lot of educating for us to kind of share with folks what we were really trying to accomplish.
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So that was a bit of a challenge in the early days.
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But as the marketplace evolved and generations started to shift, kind of the way they enjoy the outdoors and the realities that we saw emerging years ago started to become more mainstream.
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So, for example, a couple of those are with the high popularity of camping and all outdoor pursuits in general.
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That means that places traditional places for camping are overcrowded so people want to find new places and that means that campers have to be self-sufficient or provide all the needs without being in a traditional campground.
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It means that people are going to push the boundaries of season so they're not going to camp in the traditional summer months when it's most crowded.
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They're going to do off-season or even mid-winter camping.
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We have folks that go out in January in the snow.
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So our products need to accommodate those and it helps to essentially allow everybody to have opportunities to access these things, and maybe not in the most crowded places and the most crowded times of the year.
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And is that what ended up leading more towards the GOAT?
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So we have the GOAT, we have those elements and then the GOAT, the G-O-A-T that recently launched and that really seems like that checks that box of being able to get you out and about in areas that you might not be accessible with the normal GOAT.
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I don't know if that's correct to say.
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No, that's a great, great point.
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The GO is pretty darn capable of getting most places, but the GO takes it up just that extra level.
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Yeah, and it's for the overlander that has a tow rig.
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That is commensurate, you know, off-road capable.
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There's not too many places a traditional GO can't get to.
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The GO will check the final boxes on that.
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But yeah, it does speak to the trend that people want to be able to not be reliant upon, you know, the traditional campground with their trailer.
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They want to be able to go where they are.
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And then also things like the emergence of, you know, hip camp, harvest, host type places where private landowners may be accommodating folks and campers, you know.
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So you have a huge variety of conditions where you're going to camp and provisions available, so being as self-sufficient as possible, it gives you that peace of mind that I can pretty much handle anything that I find out there.
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Some of the things that are very unique about this.
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It's light, it's super light.
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So, as you said, you know, talk about a Prius.
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A Prius can actually pull this.
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A smaller car can pull your trailers, but then there's so many different configurations in this as well, and there's so many different little accessories that you can add on.
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You really have thought about a lot.
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I mean the whole box, the roto molded box, the plastic box up front.
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A lot of things in this just makes sense and, as you said, when you're coming from it from an outdoor perspective and how I'm going to use this in the outdoors, a lot of those elements seem to kind of come into play with the whole design again and the multifunctionality of these trailers.
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But when you look at them for somebody who hasn't seen them and hopefully they will now they'll go to your website and they'll begin to take a deeper dive.
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What are some of those design elements that really make this stand out other than it just being a pop-up trailer?
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Tom?
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Well, so the objectives were, you know, analyzing how a trailer is used and you know, and trying to design all the negatives out of it to the extent possible.
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The first thing I found as a toer of trailers and honestly this sounds kind of funny, but I tell folks, part of the inspiration to create the go is I kind of hate trailers, you know.
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So it's like, why do I hate them?
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Well, the first thing I want to do when I attach a trailer to my vehicle is finish towing it somewhere and get it off the vehicle.
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Right.
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So, naturally, making it lightweight is number one, and even a step further beyond that is making it attach and detach from the vehicle very securely, very obviously, so that you know.
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I think some of the negativity with a traditional trailer is the uncertainty have I connected this right?
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Is everything going to stay where it is?
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Am I going to be safe on the road, that type of thing.
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So we sought the world over and found this really remarkable hitch design from a German company that's sold in Europe and we partnered with them to tool it for US sizes and they did exclusively for us.
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Partnered with them to tool it for US sizes and they did exclusively for us.
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So we use this hitch that lets folks know visually like yep, it's connected properly.
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It's super easy to do One push button and you put it on same button, you take it off.
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Then we made the Go Camper super lightweight, so the impact on towing is minimal.
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You know, and I also tell people, one of the challenges in towing a go is remembering that you're towing a trailer because, you won't feel it.
00:20:08.721 --> 00:20:11.167
It's so light that it almost does not impact.
00:20:11.167 --> 00:20:14.301
You know the feeling of driving like most trailers do.
00:20:14.301 --> 00:20:16.968
But the lightweight materials also.
00:20:16.968 --> 00:20:26.410
If you kind of visually think with me about a go, it's got this tubular aluminum TIG welded frame that is inspired by a mountain bike.
00:20:26.410 --> 00:20:32.126
It's got these high density polyethylene components that are made the same way a kayak is made.
00:20:32.126 --> 00:20:36.868
I mean it's made out of familiar materials and processes to outdoor adventure folks.
00:20:36.970 --> 00:20:41.886
So it's like it speaks the language that we're already working in in that space.
00:20:41.886 --> 00:20:47.664
But there's so many subtle details that I could probably talk for half an hour or more on.
00:20:47.664 --> 00:20:52.267
I mean one is when you put the go into transport mode.
00:20:52.267 --> 00:21:17.749
We needed some panels that and as is the case with everything on the go, every single component, it seems, has like three functions at minimum Panels that support the beds when it's in camping mode, also support the frame when it's in what we call transport mode, and that's the mode where you could load motorcycles or ATVs on the deck, or bicycles large cargo.
00:21:17.749 --> 00:21:28.974
So instead of having that just be a solid flat panel, which would be the obvious solution, we said, well, let's make it this super lightweight aluminum framework so that there's no lateral wind load.
00:21:28.974 --> 00:21:44.709
If you're driving in a heavy crosswind, you know the trailer doesn't get blown around like most traditional box trailers do In addition to the wind, it also lets you still see completely clearly from your interior rearview mirror.
00:21:45.276 --> 00:22:09.385
Again, most trailers of that nature would be blocking the view out the back of the vehicle, and so just trying to take into account a lot of things that would give folks towing the trailer especially first-time towers or first-time RVers just a higher degree of comfort with the product and less things to worry about, less of a lengthy checklist that a traditional RV might require.
00:22:09.835 --> 00:22:11.542
So let's go back a little bit in time.
00:22:11.542 --> 00:22:14.917
At what point did you really begin to see the market take off?
00:22:14.917 --> 00:22:16.023
People are getting this.
00:22:16.023 --> 00:22:18.674
People appreciate what it is that we're putting out in the market.
00:22:19.915 --> 00:22:25.299
Yeah, great question at Sylvan Sports' earliest foundation.
00:22:25.299 --> 00:22:28.261
I never intended it to be just a single product.
00:22:28.261 --> 00:22:38.248
I always envisioned it to be the beginning of an ecosystem the beginning of evolving the industry towards lighter, simpler, greater fuel economy.
00:22:38.508 --> 00:22:42.830
You know a whole host of objectives, so the go is the first step in that.
00:22:42.830 --> 00:22:57.249
I guess when you know initially we had these great ideas for accessories, but when you've only got maybe 20 goes that you've sold out there, you know 5% of the owners want this accessory, you don't have a very big market.
00:22:57.249 --> 00:23:16.858
So after we started getting the numbers up with the number of goes out there, that's when the fun really began, because it's like, okay, now we have a new idea of something to add to it or to modify or to change, and there's enough of them out there that if just a small percentage of folks think like we do, then we're going to have enough to make these.
00:23:16.858 --> 00:23:33.994
And also just the cumulative hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of nights camped in a go and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, traveled and tested world over, just gives us more and more experience and ideas.
00:23:33.994 --> 00:23:43.122
And that is the fun part as a product designer to continue to get excited about new innovation and new opportunities.
00:23:43.122 --> 00:23:45.123
So yeah, get excited about new innovation and new opportunities.
00:23:45.903 --> 00:23:47.525
And then from the GO trailer.
00:23:47.525 --> 00:23:51.969
When did you start to kind of get into the VAST trailer?
00:23:51.969 --> 00:23:55.211
Because it is as you say in your marketing it's vastly different and it is.
00:23:55.211 --> 00:23:56.692
It's an amazing product.
00:24:02.234 --> 00:24:09.388
Well, the objective with the GO was to reinvent the pop-up camper, and so when we look at pop-up campers, you know it's a pretty small niche within the overall RV industry.
00:24:09.388 --> 00:24:22.403
Total RV units sold in North America is roughly in the half million unit category and pop-up campers make up about 20,000 of those half million.
00:24:22.403 --> 00:24:35.194
So we said, all right, we've now, you know, had over 15 years of experience in in the entry level segment of the RV industry and the reinvention of that.
00:24:35.194 --> 00:24:49.778
Let's take what we've learned and let's do the same thing to the travel trailer space, which is a much bigger space, and I liken our evolution very much to the original Coleman Company.
00:24:49.778 --> 00:24:56.479
So when I went to work for the Coleman Company it was at the end of the ownership of the Coleman family.
00:24:56.779 --> 00:25:10.627
And if you think back a couple of generations, maybe to our grandparents' generation, arguably the Coleman Company made everything from lanterns to sleeping bags, to stoves to coolers every imaginable thing you needed to enjoy the outdoors.
00:25:10.954 --> 00:25:27.045
And people could begin their enjoyment of the outdoors with the most basic of products and as they grew and their family grew and they had more kids, they could move into a Coleman pop-up camper and then they would in the traditional RV industry.
00:25:27.045 --> 00:25:33.442
They would then move into perhaps a travel trailer and then they might retire and buy a motor home.
00:25:33.442 --> 00:25:50.008
So what Sylvan Sport is just doing is resetting those dials for the current generations, you know, in other words, we've created the stuff to get into the outdoors easily and to enjoy it conveniently and take a lot of the old school hassle out of camping.
00:25:50.008 --> 00:25:57.655
And now we, with the VAST it's an evolution into, you know, the next steps for our customers and the next steps for us.
00:25:57.655 --> 00:26:13.025
And it's really neat to see, because we have a lot of go owners who have upgraded to Avast and, interestingly enough, they're really reluctant to part with their goes so far.
00:26:13.025 --> 00:26:16.921
Yeah, even though we do have a trade-in offer, they don't want to do it.
00:26:18.586 --> 00:26:19.230
Well, that's interesting.
00:26:19.230 --> 00:26:24.221
So let's talk about that a little bit for somebody who hasn't seen it, because it really is incredibly unique.
00:26:24.221 --> 00:26:43.519
I think the first time I saw it was a couple of years ago at the Outdoor Economy Conference, and a couple of things that really sort of got my attention was it's one thing if you have a smaller camper and then you feel like you constantly have to make the bed up or you have to put the seats back so it can become now a table, and this is so unique because it actually just raises up.
