NEMO Equipment
The idea of NEMO was born one turbulent night on the side of Mount Washington while Cam Brensinger spent a sleepless five hours in a poorly designed bivy. That night he realized how much opportunity there was for thoughtful design as part of the equation of enjoying adventure. And, coming down off the mountain the next day, he resolved to tackle that challenge. Three days after graduation from Rhode Island School of Design, he founded NEMO Equipment. The name – New England Mountain Equipment – is a tribute to our New England roots and home and a nod to Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo.
Cam set up operations in a restored textile mill in New Hampshire with some fellow designers and engineers, where he worked for months patterning and building prototypes of his first patent-pending airbeam-supported tents. Two years later, he launched the brand and it quickly began winning awards for design and innovation. NEMO was the overall winner of the ISPO Brand New award in 2005 and named by TIME and Popular Science as among the 100 best inventions of the year. Thus began a train of awards and PR that has only accelerated since then.
And for seventeen years as our team has grown, we continue to actively live out the belief that intelligently designed gear enables the adventures that make us all our best selves – humans who are conscious, inspired, connected and mindful. The sticker in our conference room captures our ethos: “Design Like You Give a Damn.” And we do just that, driven by a mantra to never bring anything to market that doesn’t offer a meaningfully better experience than what’s already out there.