Climbing Skins

Redesigning a classic product and overcoming softgoods, adhesives, and process challenges

In collaboration with process and development engineers, I worked as the sole design engineer on a project to redesign many aspects of the flagship climbing skins products for Black Diamond Equipment. As a primarily softgoods product, many of the challenges were outside the scope of a traditional mechanical designer, so I was able to learn a ton about softgoods supply chains, adhesives technologies, and softgoods assembly processes.

Several challenges faced on this project included:

• Designing totally new mounting hardware to be lower cost, higher durability, and lower weight and volume, while fitting the thousands of potential skis and snowboards on the market.

• Introducing sewing as a new process to our in house factory and optimizing for strength and process time.

• Working with several contract chemists to design, test, and validate a new adhesive/softgoods material combination. Learned a lot about temporary hot melt adhesive technology.

• IP research and collaboration with lawyers to design a new skin trimming tool to avoid a tight patent landscape

• Spearheading company wide brainstorm efforts to rethink how to make uphill progress on skis, and prototyping and testing the best concepts.