Paige Springer Boucher Intro

[Editors note: apologies for the unstable video; it resists fixing. My cell phone camera, even though I had it on a fixed mount, was (I think) trying to auto-stablize Paige which caused the background to jump around. Fixing the background destabilizes the foreground.]

Transcript:

Al Tabor: Tell me your name and how you got involved in the Outdoor Industry.

Paige:  I’m Paige Boucher, formerly Paige Springer, and I actually got involved in the Outdoor Industry back in Boulder when I was growing up because I was sewing kits for Altra and Frostline. Then I moved to the Bay Area and got a job The North Face as a pattern maker and that evolved into a marketing job at Sierra Designs. That’s how I met the crew that started Mountain Hardwear.

Al: Were you making kits for other people or was it just doing it for yourself?

Paige: I was doing samples actually.t   I started out sewing kits for my family. I was the sewer, I liked sewing as a kid and so I sewed vests and sleeping bags and a tent and jackets and 60-40 Parkas and that sort of thing because they had those kits.

Al: Right.

Paige: And then I got a job making samples for this company called Altra and they needed samples for stores all over the world and I would sew samples.

Al: Which led naturally to the pattern making, right?

Paige: Right, yeah.

Al: But how did that lead to marketing?

Paige: Well, okay how did the pattern making lead to marketing? I was at The North Face and things were kind of getting uncomfortable at The North Face because it was for sale and Bill Simon from Odyssey International was purchasing The North Face and things were crazy and nuts and I didn’t really like the way it was going. I had this opportunity.  Bruce Hamilton was designing a tent for an expedition…I can’t remember what expedition it was…but word came down that he was going to do this on a weekend and he needed help. I volunteered to go in and help him. And I let him know that I wasn’t really very happy in the position I was in as pattern maker because all these things were happening and I was interested in moving to a different position. He said, “Well, there’s a job opening at Sierra Designs for a Marketing Assistant Manager.” I said, “Well, I’d like to look into that.” So he got me the job there and I moved over from North Face to Sierra Designs.