Passing The Torch

KIFARUCAST

Kifaru International

Wilderness, Sports, Sports:wilderness, Education

4.9 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2020

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a lifetime of outdoor adventures leading to multiple industry firsts in comfort and longevity in the backcountry, Patrick Smith finally found worthy successors to carry on the torch of Kifaru. Truly a bittersweet moment in the lives of Patrick and Sarah Smith, who built two companies, MountainSmith from their garage, and Kifaru for serious backcountry hunters. May we all learn from Patrick's wisdom and carry on producing gear worthy of the Kifaru brand. KifaruBecome a Patron!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Caffaroo Cast. I have the great Patrick Smith to my right.
0:06.1	He came to join us today, the legend in the in the backcountry. To my left I had Chad Shumway,
0:14.7	new business partner and good friend and we're going to discuss all things Caffaroo. Thanks for
0:20.4	coming on guys. Thank you for having me. Good morning. So Patrick, I kind of, I get
0:28.0	pastored constantly to get you on the podcast but you won't come out of the woods even at your
0:33.6	young age. How old are you now? I'll be 77 in September. Gotcha. Yeah. Well if you can
0:39.9	believe that I can't get him out of the woods. So when did you start Mountain Smith, which is the
0:46.3	company you owned before Caffaroo? 1979. And that was originally basically out of your garage like
0:54.3	most companies like that wasn't it? It was indeed. So when you got that going, did you imagine it
1:01.6	would turn out to what it ended up being, I mean it ended up becoming almost all consuming, didn't it?
1:08.7	Yeah, it was, I imagine that it would be successful and it was and that was very gratifying. I got to
1:17.9	make a career in the backcountry. So what was your, what would you say your first and biggest
1:25.9	achievement or accomplishment was where you knew you were making a pretty impressive foundation
1:32.3	in the industry? Was it, was it Lumbar Packs? Was it suspensions? What was something where you were
1:37.4	like, okay, I'm definitely making, making good headway here? Well the Lumbar Packs were definitely
1:45.8	part of it, I guess the most significant event was when REI summoned me to Seattle and told me that
1:58.2	Mountain Smith was going to go system wide in the REI sales network and that I kind of realized
2:10.8	I had arrived, I had to get busy and motivate all the different stores around the country to
2:20.8	sell my stuff. So I bought a travel off for Wheel Drive, International Harvester vehicle and
2:32.4	hit the road and started visiting all the stores I could drive to and walked in the door and invited
2:40.8	sales staff that sold backpacks to go backpacking. I had the back of the travel off filled with
2:48.6	Mountain Smith backpacks and they got to go wherever they knew to go backpacking and that's what we did
	...

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