Inside Raide’s Unapologetic Design Ethos of Performance at Any Cost

A Background in Engineering

Despite his uncompromising approach to design, Siegel’s path to founding Raide counterintuitively emerges from a lack of professional experience in either of the company's principal activities: skiing and running. Siegel grew up in Chicago and studied engineering at Harvey Mudd College in Southern California. He’s been obsessed with skiing since college, but admits that running is a more recent passion. “There was a long time in my life, until probably 2019, where I didn't think I'd ever run over a mile, for probably the rest of my life," he told Field Mag in a recent interview. "I was just like, running is not something I need to do.”

Following graduation in 2014, Siegel spent almost a decade toggling between working in tech and the outdoors. He spent two seasons tallying over 150 days on skis while living in Vail and working as a ski instructor, and moving back to San Francisco in between to work as a dynamics engineer at SpaceX (Siegel also interned with the aerospace giant during college). He spent a year working as a software engineer at Snapchat, another year as a product manager at The North Face, and then two more in a similar role at the Norwegian luggage brand Db. Along the way, Siegel eventually warmed to running—primarily as good cross-training for the big days of backcountry skiing that he craved. All the while, a hard-coded engineer’s mindset made him critically aware of the shortcomings of the gear he used.

“I didn't come at these sports naturally,” said Siegel. “I've always been a little bit of a princess about them [...] like, I can't handle the gear making this any harder than it already is.”

Despite his reluctant start to running, Siegel has since embraced the discipline; he routinely logs an average of 40 miles per week outside of ski season, and has completed several ultra-distance objectives, including the Tamalpa Headlands 50K. During trips to Raide's manufacturing factory in Vietnam, which he visits multiple times per year, he tests samples on the hotel treadmill.

Siegel works on a protoype at the Raide factory | Courtesy Raide

Building a Design-First Outdoor Brand

In May 2022, Siegel tumbled over the tipping point that set him on the path to founding Raide during a ski trip to Mount Rainier. “That's when I reached peak frustration with the gear that I had, where I was like, I have to do something about it.” Over the subsequent 18 months, a frustration-fueled motivation to take sewing lessons and make a single suitable backpack for himself shifted by degrees to thinking he might commission a US-based maker to sew a few dozen packs. That evolved into an order with a factory in Vietnam, and a full commitment to turning his design ideas into a real company. The Raide LF 40L ski pack was the brand’s first product—it immediately made waves in the off-piste world for its smart compartmentalization, avy gear access, low weight, and Dyneema construction. A 30-liter follow-up won multiple awards.

Three years on from Raide's launch, Siegel says his approach to product design is unchanged. He starts by identifying a problem with a product, or one that athletes report experiencing with the existing equipment, and iterates on the design until that problem is solved. The tactic might sound obvious, but Siegel said he's observed—and experienced firsthand while working on product teams—that this is rarely how the outdoor industry functions.

Siegel's theory is that there are three types of outdoor companies: marketing-led, sales-led, and product-led. Raide is striving to be the latter, a camp which Siegel says is occupied by the likes of Arc’teryx and Lululemon. Meanwhile, marketing-led brands sell “vibes” without offering anything innovative. It's not always easy to spot the difference; “A lot of brands are marketing-led companies that try to fool consumers into thinking they are product-led companies,” he said.

More often than not, Siegel says, you can trace most design problems back to a company that has top leadership roles filled by personnel with more experience in sales than in product.

“Products started with a price point and a trend and a box that it had to fit in,” recalls Siegel of his time at The North Face. He knew that he wanted things to be different with Raide. “My box for product to check is solving a problem and working with an athlete instead of against an athlete.”

Siegel also points out that sales-led pressure to create a large number of unique products can force designers into a shorter development period before each product is locked into its final production form. At the moment, Siegel doesn't set a ceiling for the number of prototypes a Raide product may require during development, and the product line is limited by design. While some Raide launches have followed the traditional spring/fall release cycles, some haven't. Instead of dropping a full warm-weather line ahead of summer, Raide has teased out its newest products over the past couple of months. The company launched its first running vest, the LF 5L, in mid-May; in early June, it expanded its lifestyle offerings with the Heavyweight Hoodie, made from 450 gsm French terry cotton; and in late June, it unveiled its answer to the surge of hyper technical cooling fabrics with the Thermal Dispersion Tee. The rolling release cycle amps up consumer intrigue, and exemplifies the flexibility that smaller, younger companies have compared to their contemporaries.

What the Pros Need

Siegel says working with athletes on design pushes him into a detective role. How athletes articulate the problems they experience with a product and the potential design solutions often requires translation. Until you know that cars exist, you might just keep asking for a faster horse.

For her debut at the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, ski mountaineering athlete Anna Gibson needed a fast car. While testing packs ahead of the events, she'd tape her back to alleviate rubbing where her ski bindings sat directly on her back instead of on the pack. She and other skimo athletes were also cutting extraneous elements off their bags to shave every possible gram from their kit.

"They don't carry anything in the backpack. They carry everything up front in their skimo suit," Siegel said. "So it was such an interesting thing that was different from any commercial, recreational athlete application to design around. Actually, you just need this foam pad that protects your back, that you can carry a little bit of stuff in if you want, and it just needs to be really stable and quick for carrying skis and really light and breathable.”

To solve the problem of creating a hyper-breathable yet supportive and minimal pack, Siegel constructed the pack’s back panel entirely from monomesh with Dyneema ripstop over a perforated foam layer. Monomesh’s static properties made it “the perfect material,” as he put it, and although it's been used in other pack designs, he hadn’t seen the woven synthetic used for this application.

In the end, Gibson was prohibited from using the pack during her Olympic events, as Olympic regulations stipulate that any gear used by athletes in competition must have been available on the retail market for at least six months. Still, she said the final product was like “a second skin,” and that the turnaround time with Raide leading up to the Milano-Cortina games was unprecedented. For Siegel, the hectic push must have been reminiscent of the design sprints that he knew from his time working in tech. In the lead-up to the games, Gibson and Siegel consulted on progress via FaceTime from across the world: Siegel at the factory in Vietnam, Gibson at her home in Wyoming, and at training camp in Italy.

"Kyle ended up sending me versions of the pack to each location as I got closer and closer to competing. I would provide him with feedback and send them back for revision. It was the fastest product development I’ve ever witnessed or heard of. We are literally talking a few weeks in total.”

Des Linden at Marathon des Sables | Photo by Andy Cochrane

Proving Products at the Extreme

In another recent athlete collaboration, Siegel designed a prototype for Olympian and Boston Marathon champ Des Linden, who recently retired from road competition to take on ultramarathons. She brought an early iteration of a 15-liter fastpack to take on the 2026 Marathon des Sables, the legendary desert stage race, which saw over 1,500 runners traverse around 270 kilometers (168 miles) across the Sahara. The race organization provides water and emergency medical services, but otherwise, runners are required to carry all their own food and gear for the entire week. (Siegel has said the pack will come out in early 2027.)

When Linden initially reached out to Siegel, they planned for her to race in the 15-liter pack that would eventually go to production. But after taking all of her camping gear and seven days' worth of food into account, plus the capacity for enough water needed to race competitively in the notorious desert heat, they bumped the size up to 20 liters. (Deep-dive design details shared in Raide’s open-to-the-public Slack forum.)

Maximizing comfort and minimizing the base weight were Linden's main goals for her Raide proto, which weighed in empty at 290 grams. “Once I put on the initial prototype, I knew I would be using the Raide," she told us. "The materials are just incredible [...] Comfort is so important at MdS with the multi-day format. Chaffing, blisters, and bruising are all potential race killers [...] The ability to make a pack durable yet breathable was huge for this type of event. By eliminating the bounce, top to bottom, I knew I would be way less likely to develop hot spots that could hinder my race. Every pocket, strap, clip, and piece of the pack was functional for the event, and that gave me so much confidence that I would be optimized for race day.” Linden ended the race on the MdS podium as the third-fastest woman.

Having Linden put 30+ hours of testing on a product in a week’s time illustrates the kind of intensive wear-testing value that athletes can provide to brands like Raide. Linden’s 270-kilometer test run exposed a few fail points, but Siegel said that a big win for the overall design concept was that she had zero chafing for the duration of the race.

The current pace of Raide’s nimble prototyping and development has undeniably played a huge role in garnering the brand its upstart status. But the idea of an aging startup is a contradiction of terms, and the kind of dexterity associated with young, fresh companies often deteriorates with growth. The bigger the ship, the longer it takes to change course, as the saying goes. When asked how Raide will navigate this dilemma moving forward, Siegel says, candidly, that he doesn’t know. “It’s really hard.”

For now, the founder of one of the outdoor industry's unexpectedly exciting brands remains unwavering in his commitment to creating innovative gear for high-performing athletes, pro and amateur alike.

“I truly believe if you take any Raide product away from me and I have to use the next-best thing on the market, it will impact my experience skiing and running negatively. I want to see how much I can do that in every aspect of what an athlete is using for ski touring and running," he said. "I know that we can build something better if we have the resources to do it. I would like to get to that minimum scale, and I don't know what that minimum scale is, but it's definitely a lot larger than we are now. And anything beyond that, I'll just continue to build products that I think people will love.”