In 2004, NEMO hooked up with Team Nike to create the fastest and lightest adventure racing tent. It was called Hypno AR.
It was NEMO's first production run and there were a lot of lessons learned. Those lessons have shaped the way we currently make our airbeam tents; those lessons also left us with many boxes of tents that did not meet our strict quality standards. Although there were several attempts to repurpose the tents, this summer we still found ourselves with many boxes of tents that could not be donated.
As we learned more about the environmental impact of plastic shopping bags and began to hear of cities and countries banning the use of them, we saw an opportunity to recycle our patient Hypnos and change consumer habits.
Suzanne and I spent a long night cutting up the first Hypno tent to make two awesome bags and prove the idea worthy. With prospects of many more long nights ahead, we decided to enlist some help.
The first step was to cut the tent into big pieces and remove all the hardware. With help from our local Easter Seals chapter, the tents were disassembled in our studio and the hardware was recycled into our prototyping lab.
The next challenge was to maximize the number of bags that could be made from one tent. Using engineering powers that be (i.e. math), we designed a pattern that gave us 12 bags from one Hypno tent.
To keep the environmental footprint small, we teamed up with a local sewing house in New Hampshire to help cut patterns and sew the bags. Cam and I spent a back-breaking day at the sewers figuring out how to cut the slippery and oddly shaped tent pieces.
With nothing added but a NEMO label and a little bit of edge binding, Hypno AR was reincarnated into the Ditto tote bag. We took great care in trying to preserve the fun details (zippers, webbing, guyout loops, velcro, screened logos, mesh, etc.) of the original tent.
As a result, every bag is unique.
-Connie
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