Posted July 22, 2015

 

Meet Ryan Stolp: Engineer. Outdoorsman. Illustrator. Designer. Sewer. Entrepreneur.

 

I met this 26-year-old jack-of-many-trades recently at Eno River State Park in Durham, N.C., his hometown, where he showed me his creation – a bivy sack that you can hang like a hammock. Or, perhaps, a hammock that you can set up on the ground like a bivy sack. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a minimalist shelter with great versatility. Which is something Stolp and his business partner Mike Brown had in mind when they decided to launch the product. (Read the story here.)

 

What’s really unique is how the duo took an idea and turned it into a company, Alpine Hammock. After graduating from Tufts University in Boston and with little funds, they took the Internet, to a start-up site built around the relatively new phenomenon known as “crowdfunding,” or the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, typically via the Internet. There, they have enjoyed great success. Brown has since moved on to form another company but remains a minority stakeholder in Alpine Hammock.

 

In two campaigns on Kickstarter, the company has raised more than $67,000 to fund start-up efforts that include the manufacture of around 160 hammocks. Nearly 500 “backers,” as Kickstarter calls supporters, donated to the project and received in return a prototype hammock that they could test and provide feedback on.

 

And feedback – not to mention a patent infringement lawsuit – has been essential. What resulted from early beta testers’ comments and the lawsuit was a better product in quality and usability as the company gears up to take the product to a larger market.

 

But back to Stolp. During our interview, I was deeply impressed with his knowledge of the product, the business world and the textile industry – most of it acquired from this venture, not necessarily from his university studies. One might be inclined to describe him as a free spirit, like many Millennials, but I would add the word “focused” in front of “free spirit.” He is serious about the company’s success, but he’s also serious about taking the Next Big Adventure – be it climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro or finishing the last three quarters of the Appalachian Trail. (He’s already hiked the first quarter.)

 

Whatever the outdoor adventure, he said, it serves only to help improve his product knowledge as a designer and innovator. And his expeditions provide him many new ideas, he added. He knows that Alpine Hammock could be a lifelong ticket to happiness, he said.

 

“I see starting a business as a way to balance my life,” said Stolp, who recently moved from Durham to Wyoming. “If you can do something you like and have flexibility of time, that’s an asset. For me, it allows me to take trips if I want to – get realigned. Being flexible and being my own boss is powerful. And I have the ability to block off a couple of weeks and fly to North Carolina whenever I need to in order to meet with my manufacturing partner (Hawk Distributors) and oversee production.”

 

With great enthusiasm, Stolp showed me how quickly an Alpine hammock/bivy sack can be set up (about a minute-and-a-half) and demonstrated its versatility and durability. (Indeed, we hung around for a while.) He’s certainly proud of this American-made product, which is unparalleled in the marketplace, he said. And I can understand why.

 

Alpine Hammock has great potential in the growing outdoor sector and Stolp is ready to climb the next mountain with it – literally and figuratively.

 

“I’m just trying to stay outside,” he said with a smile, when given a compliment on his smarts.

Hanging with Mr. Stolp