Bring Your Family

Solving problems families face on the hiking trails

My Senior Capstone is the culmination of a semester of research, ideation, prototyping, and development. My goal was to create a line of hiking products that serve an underserved, yet significant, segment of the hiking and backpacking demographic, families. Families are essential to get kids outdoors and establish outdoor activity as a habit and a hobby. This is also a great opportunity for companies to sell to families and children specifically and establish brand loyalty at a young age. Families also face a lot of unique challenges that come with having small children, and these challenges can deter many families from trying hiking and camping. I wanted to help provide solutions to lower the 'barriers to entry' for these families.

I ended up Expanding my previous Grove Project for my capstone and developed further the Oak adult pack, the Maple children's pack, and the Seedling pack-n-play.

‍

The Oak may look familiar if you took a look at project grove on my website, and you would be right. That is because it was developed during the first part of my design process. The Capstone is an expansion of the Grove series, and the Oak serves as the foundation for the rest of the products. It contains a sleeve to store the Seedling and repurposed versa click technology to carry the Maple. To expand the Oak for this project I decided I wanted to make more detailed tech drawings that detailed the exact size and dimensions of the panels that would be on the final product.

The Maple is a children's bag built to last. It comes complete with a warranty and two stages so that it can grow with your child. The stages are 20L and 40L respectively. This should forego the reoccurring cost that comes from cheaply made children's products that wear out and become useless as your child grows. Because of the expandable nature of the Maple you can extend the life of it by using it as a daypack after the child has grown large enough for a full sized adult pack. It also takes advantage of THULE's Versa Click technology to allow parents to carry the load of tired children. You are able to attach and detach the Maple quickly and painlessly, making the whole process a lot less cumbersome.

The Next Product was the Seedling. It is an ultralight pack-n-play designed to solve the problem of there being no good way to manage infants and toddlers one may take with them on the trails. It is essentially a small tent that is 5 feet on a side that can be suspended off the ground like a hammock in order to keep bugs and other critters out of your child's space. It also has an inflatable bottom to provide more structural support and cushion.

‍

Other projects:

The Head & the Tale