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Shawn Vestal: North Face founder returns to Spokane to share experiences of his entrepreneurial climb

Hap Klopp was riding in a Copenhagen taxi last year when he spotted a familiar design on the shoulder of the driver’s jacket: the North Face logo.

“I was thinking, ‘I don’t remember getting involved with the design of gear for taxicab drivers,” Klopp said. “ ‘This is getting a little far afield.’ ”

The North Face – which sold $2 billion worth of backpacks, tents and puffy coats last year – has definitely flown far from the gear-and-granola days when Klopp started it in a storefront on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California.

A Spokane native and 1960 graduate of Lewis and Clark High, Klopp’s 20-year run at the helm of the company saw it grow from its niche beginnings in tents and sleeping bags to a company that was aggressively applying new technologies in ways that gave rise to a revolution in backpacking and outdoor sports. After he sold the company in 1988, it continued to expand, developing into a hybrid of gear and fashion – a brand as ubiquitous around the Inland Northwest as Subaru.

Klopp is coming home this week for a series of public events, including a reading from his new book and an appearance at the Bookie building on the Riverpoint Campus. At 73, he remains a serial entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, professor and whirlwind. During our recent telephone conversation, Klopp spoke so quickly that it was hard to keep up; meanwhile, I could hear him ripping open envelopes in the background, sorting mail as he zipped cogently and clearly from subject to subject.

Klopp grew up on Rockwood Boulevard and attended Roosevelt Elementary before LC. His family was in business, owners of White Pine Sash wood products, and he was a precocious kid. One of the things he appreciated most about his education in Spokane, he said, was that he was “allowed to be idiosyncratic.” In seventh and eighth grades, he was put on an ambitious directed reading program of political thinkers – from Thomas Paine to Gandhi.

“It kept me from disrupting the rest of the class,” he said.

At LC, he played quarterback on the football team and tennis, graduating in 1960. He went on to Stanford, where his love of sports continued. Relegated to backup quarterback for the university team, he left and jumped into collegiate wrestling. He also played – and dominated – virtually every intramural event, from tennis to track to boxing.

“To win the boxing championship, I knocked out Mitt Romney’s brother, Scott,” Klopp said. “He was a nice guy.”

Upon leaving graduate school with his MBA, his interest in sports and the outdoors dovetailed with his desire to start a business. He bought a retail and mail-order store called The North Face in 1968, and expanded into manufacturing. At the time, the world of camping and outdoor gear was a different universe.

“People would only go a couple hundred feet off the road (to camp), because everything was so heavy,” Klopp said.

That world would be unrecognizable to anyone who grew up with the lightweight, durable, tricked-out, waterproof gear of today, and a lot of that is due to innovations Klopp and his team introduced.

The North Face started in a niche: making and selling specialized, expensive sleeping bags and lightweight backpacks, and then moving on to tents and clothing. The company applied military materials from the Vietnam War to outdoor gear. Airplane aluminum became tent poles. Parachute nylon became backpacks.

To get a sense of how revolutionary their work was, consider this: When Klopp wanted to design a backpacking tent, he enlisted visionary designer and thinker Buckminster Fuller. Klopp had met “Bucky” through a friend from college, and he and his team were “Buckminster Fuller acolytes” interested in the principles behind Fuller’s geodesic domes.

Fuller agreed to mentor the design team that eventually produced a four-person tent called Oval Intentions in 1975. It was the first geodesic tent – a museum piece in its graceful design and the forerunner of the modern tent.

Klopp oversaw several expansions and new product lines before selling the company in 1988. It was in the 1990s and later that the company evolved its prestige/fashion component, becoming popular in worlds that had little to do with extreme adventuring, such as hip-hop fashion.

Klopp continued starting and leading companies, serving on boards of directors, consulting and writing. His books include “Conquering the North Face: An Adventure in Leadership,” and his newest, “Almost: 12 Electric Months Chasing a Silicon Valley Dream.”

That book focuses on Klopp’s experiences as a marketing director for Ardica Technologies, a manufacturer of wearable fuel-cell technology that quickly went from “industry darling to messy failure.” For all his success, Klopp is very interested in failure, and says his experience with Ardica offers lessons for entrepreneurs.

Klopp has lived in Berkeley since he started the North Face, but he comes back to Spokane a couple of times a year to see friends, he said.

“Spokane gave me a lot,” he said, “and it probably framed the way I look at the world.”

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.

Eds note: A previous version of this story misstated The North Face’s revenues from last year. That number was $2 billion.

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