Word: gearing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Demetrios Coupounas, an avid outdoorsman and entrepreneur, dreamed of tapping into the money spigot known as the Pentagon. But until last year he had come up parched. A co-founder of GoLite--a privately held outdoor-gear firm based in Boulder, Colo.--Coupounas tried to sell military purchasers on his company's lightweight tents, backpacks and sweat-wicking T shirts. But even after calling evaluators at the Army's gear-testing center in Natick, Mass., meeting with sales reps who hawk wares to the military and calling Navy SEAL officers directly, he had booked just a handful of individual sales...
Shortly after the war in Afghanistan, however, Coupounas set up a booth at an outdoor-gear trade show in Anaheim, Calif., and to his surprise, some of the same military buyers who had rebuffed him for years came clamoring for his goods. He started selling small batches of GoLite undergarments to special-forces units. Today he says he has a thriving military business, accounting for 10% of his roughly $5 million in annual sales. "We don't actively design for the military," says Coupounas, 37, who climbs 14,000-ft. mountains to personally test his firm's new products. "They...
With the military under orders to get lighter and faster, several companies that make gear for outdoor-adventure athletes are booking sales to special-forces units assigned everywhere from Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains to the Philippine jungles. "Private companies are leading in the R. and D. of this stuff," says Colonel Tom Blume, director of procurement for U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Fla. "We love off-the-shelf items because we don't have to put R. and D. into them...
...week, the IWC - once a bastion of an industry now worth only about $50 million (compared to whale-related tourism's estimated $1.5 billion) - agreed for the first time to establish a conservation committee. Its task: to advise the IWC on potential threats to marine mammals from pollution, sonar gear, ships, global warming - even whale watching itself. Environmentalists see it as a landmark step. "They're moving out of the old mindset - that everything has to be killed - into the more embracing notion that the earth is getting smaller and smaller and we have to treat all our resources with...
...That supernova could be Superman Is Dead, which sings in English and has crafted its image in the vein of Green Day and Blink 182. The sound is less poppy but the gear is the same: requisite chain hanging from the wallet, roomy pants that occasionally slip down below the belt, and old-school Vans. Seringai has carved its own niche out of a sound pioneered by the Deftones and Queens of the Stone Age. The quartet has already generated significant buzz in the critical cities of Jakarta and Bandung before even releasing an album...