Kyle Siegel Approaches Raide Like An Architect
A conversation with Kyle Siegel of Raide on his design philosophy and Raide Research's raison d'être.
Kyle Siegel is the founder and CEO of Raide Research, the trail and ski brand that is quickly becoming one of the most popular running belt companies on the market. He’s also a former SpaceX engineer who taught himself sewing on the way to building a backpack company. We sat down to talk about his engineering brain, why he started with belts, and the vest he just launched.
From SpaceX to Sewing Lessons
CT: Kyle, can you introduce yourself a bit for the readers?
KS: I’m Kyle. I’m the founder and CEO of Raide. The journey that led me to Raide: I grew up in Chicago, didn’t really ski or run much at all. Went to school for engineering out west and started to get into outdoor sports through being in California and having access to drive to Mammoth and Yosemite. I worked at SpaceX through college, and after college got a bunch of ski bumming out of my system in Vail and lived in Vail for a couple of seasons as a ski instructor. Worked at Snapchat as an engineer, then wanted to transition to outdoor industry. So I worked in the performance art team at The North Face. Worked at the outdoor brand DB after that, then started Raide from there.
At SpaceX, I was a mechanical engineer focused on vibration analysis. My team’s job was to make sure nothing inside the rocket broke from vibration. We were working with stuff that couldn’t be modeled, so it was all very experimental data analysis driven. I became a very strong data analyst and did some machine learning. I always liked software engineering, so I took software engineering classes in college. I ended up using software engineering to build tools to do the data analysis for the vibration analysis.
When I went to Snapchat, I was a full blown software engineer. I wasn’t working on hard products at all. I was doing machine learning and data analysis specifically related to search.
CT: You had a heavy tech background. Why bring that approach to the ski and trail space? You could have been working on a million different things.
KS: The way that my mind and personality is, is very problem-solution oriented. I see problems in the world. I want to fix them. That’s how a lot of engineers are. And I see problems in every product that I touch. It just so happened that the problems that I experienced in products related to skiing and running made me a lot more aggravated than other things in my life. That frustration led me to wanting to solve those problems myself. These problems were taking away from the activities I did to derive the most enjoyment and meaning in my life, being skiing and running. That made them more important to fix than the fact that I don’t like my kitchen chair or don’t love my coffee maker.
I took a very natural evolution to get where Raide is today. I was skiing with a ski backpack and I was super frustrated. I had tried every ski backpack and I was like, I gotta do this myself. I actually went and took sewing lessons as the first step because I was going to make my own backpack for just me. And then I couldn’t sew a pillowcase. So I was like, okay, no chance I’m making myself the ski backpack. Maybe in a decade. So I was like, can I find a person that can sew well enough to make one for me? Maybe they’ll make a hundred and I can sell them.
Through that process of designing what that backpack was, I was like, there’s all of these other products I feel equally passionate about. Every running belt I use bounces. There’s not a running short on the market that I want to put my cell phone in. There’s no hybrid ski bibs on the market. So this actually adds up to a company. This can all be linked by human-powered movement.
The type of thing that inspires me is a storytelling quality, brand quality and product quality that isn’t garage grown. That naturally evolved to, okay, this is the type of thing that I want to put out in the world. It needs to have a strong brand and strong meaning and really great product. To do that, you have to launch at somewhat of a certain scale.
The World Doesn’t Need More Sh*t
CT: A lot of brands come to market earlier than you guys did, with something that’s often not that good—the v1 solves a problem but is far from perfect. Did your background at big tech and engineering companies, where features have to be polished when you ship them, shape how you approach this?
KS: It’s not as much from tech. It’s more that anything I make, I have to use it. For me to have to use it and it being inferior is against the entire reason why I started the company. I came at the company truly believing the world doesn’t need more sh*t. If I’m going to put more sh*t into the world, it needs to be different and add to someone’s life in a positive way that no other product is doing. It doesn’t need to do that for everyone, but it needs to do that for someone. Hopefully that someone is more than just me.
There’s a very natural inflection point in the product development process where I go from not looking forward to testing the product to looking forward and naturally wanting to use the product. If I hit that point, it’s usually ready.
CT: What does that inflection point look like? It’s a function of how short it’s falling?
KS: It’s this natural feeling. You don’t necessarily know where it’s going to fall short, whether it’s a short and it falls short on the fit, or the pole carry on the vest doesn’t work as well as the belt. You take every prototype as testing a hypothesis: can this thing solve this problem better than the last version? What problem or set of problems am I trying to solve? The output isn’t always in your control. The factory might mess up the fit, or the material you chose for the next round is not the best.
For the shorts, which were the hardest product by far that we’ve done, maybe I got the pocket right. Finally the pocket’s right. But then the liner doesn’t fit correctly. There are all these conflating things. You might not still look forward to reaching for the product, but you figured out one thing, and hopefully you can put it all together in the final.
Guinea Pigging in Vietnam
CT: Your background at SpaceX was very test-heavy and experimental. Were there similarities between testing rocket vibration and testing a running belt?
KS: It’s super funny that I worked on shaking things at SpaceX, and then it came around back in my career with essentially vibration again. I developed the running belt super quickly in a four month period without really getting it on anyone besides myself and Anton Krupicka later. I went to Vietnam and I was like, I’m not leaving until I finish, or have line of sight to finishing.
I would go on the treadmill every day with four different belt prototypes, load them up with water bottles in back, as much weight as I could put in back as possible. Get on a treadmill that was next to a mirror and try to run, film myself in slow-mo on my iPhone, then review the footage of what was bouncing the most.
CT: Eyeballs only? No tracking software?
KS: We could have, but you could just see. Didn’t need to overcomplicate it. I’m really good at getting something in a conference room and knowing what’s wrong with it. That’s a skill I have. It’s from thinking about things in a mechanical engineering way. I can visualize the product and understand how things are interplaying together. That’s how my mind works as a mechanical engineer.
CT: Walk me through it for the belt.
KS: I was like, how can I make a running belt not bounce? You need something that’s pulling tension across the load. The first proof of concept was two elastic bands that you pulled and Velcroed to the belt. Just an X of elastic. Can this make it not bounce? Then I was thinking about all these stretchy things that would go across. And I was like, wait, why don’t I just leverage the elasticity of a stretchy material to pull tension across, rather than something that I add to the belt? But if you add tension across the belt, it can collapse the belt. So we need to add stiffness. How can I add stiffness? I added the foam, and there’s these little plastic stays behind the foam.
If you’re tightening the belt, you also want it to be easy to get in and out of, especially the stuff in the front, like your phone that you’re maybe accessing a lot. So I had this subset of problems and I can visualize: the strap system pulls tension across the back. Then it passes through to the inside, so it’s up against your pelvic bones. That’s making it so it’s not stretching the front. Your stuff in the front is really easy to get out of, because the straps don’t go across the front. If they did, they’d press everything in the front pocket against your body and make it uncomfortable. So I had these three interplaying things that I was able to put together and visualize.
Material as Function
CT: How much did material play into that?
KS: It was super instrumental. You need a material that stretches, but if it stretches too much, then stuff will always be bouncing. You need it to stretch and stretch and stretch until it doesn’t. Then it’s providing a lot of holding force. A lot of the prototypes I was testing on that treadmill didn’t have any design differences. They were all just different materials of the same design.
That’s been a big learning curve for me because I didn’t have a soft goods materials background. Going from feeling a 10 inch by 10 inch square of a material to being like, how’s this actually going to function in a product, is a massive skill. At TNF there’s a 10-person materials team or maybe even bigger. They have people dedicated to that job.
The fact that I design our equipment and apparel is sort of interesting. Belts and vests are in this category where they sit halfway between an apparel product and an equipment product. Our belts and vests use materials typically used in both. The vest base is an equipment material I found through exploring Dyneema for our ski backpacks, same with the belt face. But the binding is this really soft and super premium binding that I found from the apparel world. The outer for the vest is from the apparel world. Those would be different teams at bigger companies.
The Dyneema mesh on the vest is a good example. I was at a material trade show looking for ski pack materials at a ski pack supplier and found this mesh. I had no idea of making a vest at the time. Found this mesh, thought it was interesting. I take tons of pictures when I’m at trade material shows, so I have a material library that’s a photo album.
It popped into my head when we started designing the vest. Someone showed me a picture of their vest and all the mesh was super torn up after running CCC. It was their second run with the vest. I was like, oh, I have exactly the thing that will help this and no one’s using it. I scrolled, scrolled, scrolled, found it, got the material moved, made it. No one’s putting Dyneema into vests. Our mesh is 80 grams per square meter. What most of them use is what’s called a Darlington mesh, a certain construction pattern. That’s typically 160 to 180 grams per square meter. So it’s half the weight and significantly stronger.
I would never have found this material if we weren’t also making ski packs.
Performance, Function, Style
CT: Why start with belts? Most brands would have started with apparel or a vest.
KS: Everything comes from a problem I experienced with our products. It’s not, here’s an opportunity, or here’s a trend, which is how a lot of other companies are. I’m really proud of the originality I’ve brought to everything we’ve done. It’s self-inspired from problems I experienced as a skier and runner.
I use both, but I used both out of necessity. I would use a utility belt for short runs, and it was bouncy. So annoying. For long runs in the mountains I was using a vest, but stylistically, belts are cooler.
The white space that let Raide exist is that brands aren’t able to effectively combine performance, function and style into one product. A product needs to have all three of those things to add to my experience instead of take away from it. If I don’t look how I want to look, it takes away. If something is high performance, it might be super light, super breathable, but not comfortable or bouncing or chafing. It takes away from my experience. And if it’s not performing, that obviously takes away from my experience.
Style really matters to me. There’s the style of how you actually look, and there’s the style of how you approach sport. That’s a bigger thing in skiing and climbing, where people talk about the style of you skiing a line, or the style of you climbing a peak. You can do it in this super hacky, clunky way. It can take you three days to ski Rainier, you camp and you’re heavy. Or you can be super minimalist, fly up it, ski down it in seven hours. There’s no wrong way. But I feel super passionate that there’s a style of sport that I like, and I’m trying Raide to help people do.
CT: Can you articulate that style?
KS: It’s a balance of minimalism and efficiency. A reason I started Raide is everyone was equating being lightweight with performance, and there’s so much more to performance. You should be well hydrated and well fueled to attack the objective you’re out there for. You need something that supports that.
The mission of Raide is to elevate the freedom of human-powered movement. We do that by building products that actually help you achieve what you’re trying to achieve. Our customer is the objective-minded customer. Someone going out for a reason, whether it’s a distance, a summit, a time. Someone who has a goal and they’re trying to get product to help them achieve it. To me, a vest, this thing strapped across your chest, is the antithesis to freedom.
CT: It’s objectively constraining. You really only want to take it if you need it.
KS: Yes. That completely informed the direction we took in the vest design. You only should grab this if it’s going super long. So how can this actually support you going super long? What do you need when you’re going super long, and how can we make this vest super effective for that?
For me, I run 25 miles and 8,000 vertical feet of gain with the belt almost every weekend in July and August. So what is the point of a vest? Should we do a vest? Do I need a vest? The answer is yes, you do sometimes. When I need so much water or other layers I cannot fit in the belt. And there’s the whole other piece of the puzzle: sometimes it’s just on the required gear list, unfortunately.
We want to work with Des Linden and Ana Gibson. My mission starting Raide was to elevate human-powered movement, but a signal of success is our products would be what people reach for when they’re progressing sport. Either on the adventure side with first ascents or FKTs, or racing. That’s where sport gets progressed. That’s why we have an athlete team. I want to support people who are progressing sport. The reality is, if they want to race and there’s a required vest on the race, we kind of got to have it.
Designing The Vest
CT: Tell me a bit more about the vest design.
KS: I’m going to be frank, this is the most nervous I’ve been launching a product. How it’s going to be perceived, and the nuance of function.
I came at this vest from multiple directions of design thinking. I have this design principle. I call it the anti-Christmas tree design principle, where I don’t like things getting strapped onto products. This product actually needs to help you go further than our running belt does, if it is worthy of existing. Style and aesthetics is important to me. I wanted this thing that has a really clean silhouette when you’re carrying a lot of equipment to go further. I don’t want you to look like the hunchback of Notre Dame on a mountain run where you need a layer, with your ice axe bouncing all around, or your poles bouncing all around in a quiver.
The tough thing is the pole quiver. The thing I’m most nervous about is it’s just not as easy. The pole quiver is built into this vest and it’s not as easy to use as a strap on pole quiver that people are using now. But it bounces way less. It looks way better. A lot of people, when they use poles, they’re going on one or two or three really big climbs during their run. In Chamonix, you’re going up 4,000 feet to get anywhere. Then you put your poles away and you’re on this super flowy flat descent mini climb where you’re not necessarily grabbing your poles. Having something that’s really comfortable and not bouncing, and you don’t have to buy a second thing, and it’s significantly lighter than adding a pole quiver, is a trade off I was excited about presenting to the market. It’s different and nothing exists that did it and supported a certain style of running that I think is cool. But it is not the best. It is not the best, if you’re going to want to take poles in and out a hundred times during a race.
What was cool is, I personally don’t even use poles when I’m running. So if I’m going to make this pole quiver, I would like it to actually be useful for other things. It fits bottles and it fits an ice tool really well. It’s putting stuff really high up on your back to reach. The coolest thing is that you can carry four flasks that are 100% accessible while you’re running and don’t bounce. One in the back pocket. That’s very cool. This is the tool that helps you go further than the belt.
There’s this interesting back pocket system that we applied for a patent for. There’s two things we applied for patents for with this vest: the bottle tensioning system that makes it not bounce, and this back pocket design.
So many vests, and products in general, just don’t have a sharp perspective on how they should be used. By choosing not to make a generalist product and having a sharp perspective on how someone should use your product, you can make it so much better. So many vests have this big pocket in the back that’s meant for everything, but really at the same time works for nothing. If you put a bottle in there, it bounces around, or if it’s not completely full you can’t get to it while you’re running.
Our vest is much more compartmentalized in the back. You can only do two things when you’re running with a vest. You can reach some stuff right from the top, barely. And you can reach to your back that way. We have a back pocket that you can reach that way. Then we have these two vertical pockets that play stuff literally right here. You can put poles in there, you could put bottles in there, you can put an ice tool in there, you can put ice in there, and you can put layers in there. They’re these vertical pockets that are split and accordion out.
CT: How does the bounce reduction work on the vest?
KS: The learning of the belt was, I’ve been able to pull tension across this elastic fabric and that reduces bounce. I really took that into the vest. You already are adding tension to the vest when you close it, but every other vest on the market is disconnected to static material. You’re not using that tension to put compression across the weight in the vest. That’s how the belt works. So when you tighten our vest, it’s pulling the fabric on the flask bottles to tighten that fabric, stretch the material out more, which adds compression, which reduces the bounce. That’s the mechanic of how the belt works. And I applied that to the vest.
We applied for a patent because it’s all original. We were able to control the bounce, we don’t need foam behind the bottles. They’re not bouncing. There will be athletes who finish Western States with bruised ribs from their vests bouncing. When you’re hammering downhill at five-minute pace, it’s crazy.
We shot a bunch of stuff for our vest in slow-mo on crazy cameras. I think we had a $25,000 camera shooting this vest campaign that we rented. You look at it super close up, and it’s cool.
Engineers, Not Designers
CT: A lot of this has been about solving your own problems. But how has working with athletes shaped what you do?
KS: You have to be a detective and pull out their problems and not have them give you solutions, and try to dig out what they care about. Then that’s what I go to solve.
A lot of people in these industries come from fashion, not engineering. I don’t necessarily need as much athlete feedback. If I know their problems, I can determine if I’m solving them myself. I do need athletes for fit and durability testing, which we do quite a bit. They’re getting out a lot more than I can.
When I was at The North Face, so many of the designers didn’t ski or run. I don’t think that’s the case for these smaller brands anymore. But they might hire designers way more from a fashion background.
When you think about where the money is in the broader apparel industry, it’s fashion and sports, football, basketball, not running and outdoor. That trickles down to the design schools. Pattern making and fit for fashion very much applies to sport. But there’s maybe one or two outdoor product design programs. U of O has one, because of the proximity to Nike. Western Colorado has one. There’s maybe one more I’m forgetting about. They’re popping up more and more.
CT: A lot of the great designers and architects weren’t just doing houses. They were doing chairs and tables. Frank Lloyd Wright and Gehry had a certain idea of how you’re supposed to live, and that was applied to designing the house. They were solving for a specific problem in a specific style, because they thought that’s how it should be done. They had a really specific perspective. You might not love it, but they were doing cool stuff and it was unique.
KS: A hundred percent. And connected through their furniture and home design. That’s what I’m trying.
For Later
Check out my bit on 3rd and 4th wave running stores, which features a list of the best running stores in the world. Indie Running Stores
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Have followed Raide for awhile and this was so cool to get an inside peek. Thanks for sharing this!
Terrific interview Cole. Just bought the 2L belt I'm hoping to put to work at one of the Broken Arrow Races.