An Everest of Their Own

BOULDER, Colo. —  Fred Kline steers a silver Cadillac DeVille east, away from peaks packed with snow. His boss, Tom Quinn, unfolds a map in the passenger’s seat. On this bright November morning, the two men, both 39, are headed to a key meeting for their company, Nextec Applications Inc., a precocious upstart near San Diego.

Quinn watches for an address on Arapahoe Avenue, as they wind past half-frozen creeks. The trees are bare. Quinn is embarrassed about the Cadillac, a reward from the car rental agency for being such a good customer. For the last three years, as Nextec’s sales manager, Quinn has traveled the world for a company with ambitions as lofty as the north face of the Flatirons here.

“This is a critical time for us,” says Quinn, who took a 20% pay cut and moved his family from Augusta, Ga., to work for Nextec. “The next 18 months could be very, very important.”

Nextec is selling more than just the high-tech fabric that’s packed in the trunk. What the company is peddling amounts to a head-spinning departure from prevailing gospel in the outdoors clothing industry. For years, in recreational stores worldwide, sales associates have preached two standard pieces of advice for sports such as climbing and sailing: One, if you want to stay dry and comfortable, go with Gore-Tex, the worldwide leader in treated fabric for nearly 25 years. (The name Gore-Tex is so famous that it is misused to refer to products generically, the way Kleenex and Xerox are.) Two, if you don’t want to up your odds of dying on a mountaintop, never, ever use cotton--known as the “killer fabric” because it soaks up moisture and steals body heat.

So along comes Vista-based Nextec, a company with 100 employees, that introduced its fabric at a trade show in January 1999, starting with a couple million dollars in annual sales. W.L. Gore & Associates Inc., which makes Gore-Tex, is a Maryland-based company with 6,500 employees worldwide and $1.2 billion in sales.

We’re not another Gore-Tex knockoff, Quinn tells potential clients. We use a new, patented technology to engineer fabrics. No one else offers it, and our full-time patent attorney makes sure of that. Our fabric will protect people from the elements. Even after we treat the fabric, and even in freezing conditions, it doesn’t change its feel or drape. It doesn’t get crunchy or noisy like other treated rain gear. In fact, hikers and other athletes will be able to head out in a downpour wearing--and we can show you extensive test data--Nextec’s cotton.

Nextec is catering to a new breed of demanding, restless outdoors enthusiast--hikers and others who are unhappy with what some see as the stiff feel of laminated or coated fabrics and wouldn’t mind paying extra for the comfort of a cotton that saves their skin in a squall. These days, industry experts say, a new breed of consumer is searching for the same kind of cool features in athletic wear that they get in laptops and Palm Pilots. In response, companies are offering gear that is “bomb proof” (industry-speak for durable) and “smart,” “phase-change materials” that store body heat and release it when the temperature drops. Nextec is promising “performance cotton,” and so far, the industry is intrigued.

Some of its most respected names are using Nextec’s treated cottons and synthetic fabrics, called Epic. They include Patagonia, L.L. Bean and Timberland, and others in Europe, New Zealand and Japan. Nike is working with Nextec to develop fabrics for golf and other sports. (Imagine, Quinn says, if he could get Tiger Woods to wear Epic cotton pants at the Masters. . .) For the last two years, Nextec has landed on Sporting Goods Business magazine’s “Companies to Watch” list in the fibers and fabrics category.

But outside the industry--and, sometimes, even within--Nextec is struggling for name recognition. Quinn, who has a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, hopes that by the time his kids hit junior high school, they’ll be able to point to a jacket and say, my dad helped get Epic off the ground, and everyone will know what they’re talking about.

First, though, Quinn and Kline must make a splash in places like Boulder, a mecca of outdoors companies and enthusiasts. Here, they set their sights on GoLite, another young company with a similar industry buzz and reputation for innovation. Last summer, at a trade show, Kline had two meetings with GoLite officials. On this morning, they meet the company’s president, Demetri Coupounas.

Quinn leads the presentation before Coupounas and three GoLite staff members, his tone low-key and unhurried. He is blond and green eyed, 5 feet 10, with the build of the star college football player he once was. In a long-sleeve, sea-foam green shirt, khakis and loafers, he has a ruggedly professional look.

Coupounas, 35, is funny, direct and inquisitive, an overgrown kid in a sweatshirt, jeans and untied athletic shoes. He leans his chair back against a drafting table, both feet dangling in the air, arms folded across his chest. Fifteen minutes into Quinn’s presentation, he throws out an opinion. A GoLite executive is using a jacket made of Epic fabric and loves it. “He’s a real fan,” Coupounas says, “but I hated it. . . .” That’s not quite what he means, but it sounds bad, right off the bat.

Meeting Demand for Something New

Quinn shrugs off the indignities. Mostly, on sales calls, he senses a hunger for something new, something that captures the imagination. That’s why he often starts his pitch by talking up Epic cotton. He pushes in the top of a cotton fishing hat and pours water in the well. The water pools, and when he dumps it out, he shows that the hat stays dry. It’s not a real demonstration of water resistance, because, of course, a rainstorm is much more powerful than a splash of water from a bottle. But it makes a point and is a dandy party trick. (One night, after a sales call, Quinn and Kline headed to a bar with some clients, and drank a $50 bottle of wine from an Epic fishing hat.)

In whatever way, Nextec has to seize the public’s imagination the way Gore-Tex did in the mid-’70s, industry experts say. That’s no easy task in the diverse $40.5-billion U.S. sports apparel market. But, according to the Florida-based Sporting Goods Manufacturers Assn., active baby boomers with time and money on their hands are looking for comfort and willing to check out new products, both of which play into Nextec’s hands.

“Consumers are much more savvy than they were five or 10 years ago,” says Gene Mezereny, an assistant manager for the REI store in Arcadia. “Everyone has Web access. They do their homework.”

Also, consumers want outdoors fabric to do something, says MariBeth Baloga, chair of the textile department at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles. “As we become accustomed to technology, our expectations change,” she says. “Certainly, across the board, consumers are expecting more . . . in our phone service, our kitchen, our cars, everything. This is one more aspect of the same story.”

*

Gore-Tex started the story on high-tech fabric for the outdoors in 1976. By now, industry types know how a laminated fabric like Gore-Tex works. A membrane is bonded to the backside of nylon, polyester or another fabric (but never cotton). The membrane’s pores--9 billion per square inch of fabric--are too small for rain and wind to pass through but big enough for sweat to escape, company officials say. An oil-hating barrier is also added to help barricade the wind. Gore-Tex is guaranteed to be waterproof.

Nextec’s technology is called “encapsulation,” a process that does not change the thickness or feel of the fabric, the company promises. In the process, an ultra-thin film of water-resistant silicone encapsulates individual fibers in the woven fabric. Silicone also is used to plug the spaces between yarns so rain and wind will not slip through.

But the process leaves micro-holes open to push out perspiration. Epic is water-resistant, which means it keeps you dry in a big storm, says Peter Ellman, Nextec’s president and CEO. But you probably would want a waterproof jacket if you plan to ski a black-diamond run in Vail in the dead of winter, he acknowledges. Now try saying all that on a billboard. “We have to have very brilliant marketing,” Ellman says. (The company’s current slogan: “Outsmart the outdoors.”)

This year, Nextec is widening its advertising to general publications. Next year, it will hire a crew of young snowboarders, climbers and extreme sports participants to test Epic fabric and bring the word to the public.

“I think Nextec has a tremendous challenge,” says Steve Shuster, brand manager for the maker of Gore-Tex. Consumers, he says, are used to the waterproof and breathable standards set by Gore-Tex and might be confused by a product that claims to be “water resistant.”

Not to mention a company that claims its cotton repels rain.

Right, skeptics used to say to Quinn on sales calls. Cotton? Still, no one turned him away, especially after he told them about his company’s $50 million in venture capital from a group including global financier George Soros.

The company’s technology was dreamed up in the late ‘80s by inventor Mike Caldwell of San Diego. Caldwell, who flew hot-air balloons, developed an idea to protect fabric from weather and heat. In the mid-’90s, Nextec started in a small unheated warehouse that got so cold in the winter that employees wore gloves with cutoff fingertips to work on laptops late into the night.

Before Nextec’s fabric even had a name, Patagonia officials were intrigued enough to sign on three years ago. (Ventura-based Patagonia calls it “EncapSil.”) Nextec’s challenge may be difficult, says Hal Thomson, a Patagonia spokesman, but adds, “If you can do something that’s truly innovative and bring something . . . to the market that sets itself apart and has its own story and own function, then you can get consumer attention. . . . It’s a technology that’s invisible, yet it works really well.”

Now how to tell the story? Quinn works it the old-fashioned way: door-to-door. He once drove to nowhere, Nebraska, to meet the owner of a hunting store at the best restaurant in town, a bad steakhouse.

Skeptical of High-Tech Claims

In Boulder, he makes a cold call on a mountaineer named Gary Neptune, who owns a single outdoors store. Neptune, 55, is president of the locally revered Neptune Mountaineering shop and skeptical of companies that stake high-tech claims. When he flips through trade magazines, his eyes glaze over at the 500th name of a new fabric or treatment, and he promptly forgets them.

Still, “Nextec” rang a bell, and when Quinn and Kline call, he invites them over. He greets them barefoot, in jeans and a fleece pullover. If Nextec wants to win over traditionalists, this is the place to do it.

Neptune Mountaineering has the feel of an early ‘70s ski-lodge bar, with hand-printed signs and tabloid headlines tacked to the walls. The shop is a museum of sorts, with souvenirs on display from the owner’s famous climbing buddies. He also has boots and crampons from Sir Edmund Hillary’s first ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953.

Neptune doesn’t think much of all the new stuff on the market. In fact, if he were to summit Mt. Everest again, as he did in 1983, he would just pull his old backpack and homemade, down-filled pants off the wall. But he perks up as Quinn mentions cotton. He would love to wear such a cotton on the mountain, if, after several more years of field tests, Epic proves itself.

“I think they’re onto something good,” Neptune says later, “and it may be that they do get real recognition. But what I’m saying is that it’s going to be hard.”

*

The way Quinn sees it, it’s not so hard to sell something he wears himself and gives to all his relatives. Before this job, Quinn had worked sales management posts for well-established products. He wanted a job where he would dive into the science of something and sell a product he had passion for. Now, his office is 20 yards from the laboratory, and he’s in there all the time, talking to the research scientists. (He has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, which he attended on a football scholarship.)

Despite all that’s at stake, he isn’t a bit nervous about the GoLite sales call. And he doesn’t flinch when Coupounas says he doesn’t like the Epic jacket.

Why not? he shoots back.

Turns out Coupounas had tried a prototype fabric that Nextec no longer uses. He put on the jacket, strapped on a heavy backpack and hiked uphill. The jacket wasn’t breathable enough for him. “I’m a real sweaty guy,” Coupounas says. “I overwhelmed it.” But, he acknowledges, he’s extreme. Also, he says, he didn’t test the jacket in a storm. He has since read the test data and talked to people he respects who assure him that the fabric keeps them dry.

An hour later, Coupounas picks up a fabric sample that Kline passes out, a sturdy but lightweight polyester. He rubs it against his face and grins. “This is the one,” he says.

By morning’s end, he has decided. He rattles off an initial order, enough fabric to make about 5,000 jackets, pants and vests for spring 2002. Later, he says, he made the decision “not because we love them. Not because they have buzz. Not because they’re from California. We need the most breathability we can get, the most rain resistance we can get it. . .that’s it.”

This deal is done. But the day is young. After a quick lunch with the GoLite folks, they are back in the Cadillac.

“Happy?” asks Quinn.

Kline, at the wheel, doesn’t reply. He’s too busy looking for the street that will take them to their next call.