How a Scandinavian Ethos Helps Thule Design Innovative Outdoor Gear

This seemingly straightforward design makes the difference between a campsite setup that's pretty fast and one that's lightning fast. Or, the difference between staying warm and dry and getting drenched after arriving at a campsite late on a rainy night; or the difference between an easy transfer of little ones from a car seat to a cozy bed and a thermonuclear meltdown (fellow outdoor parents, you know what I mean). Which is exactly why the new tent caught my attention.

Bringing High-Performance Gear from the Countryside to the Catwalk

Those 30 seconds are the result of three-and-a-half years of rigorous development by Thule's design team. Everything the company makes is put through the wringer at the brand’s state-of-the-art testing facility in Hillerstorp, a small town in the Swedish countryside 153 miles from Malmö, where the brand got its start. Home to a population of 1,700, Hillerstorp also boasts a pizzeria, an Asian food market, and an American-Western-style amusement park that’s only nine kilometers away.

“We do thousands of hours of testing to make sure everything from the fabric to the experience is right,” Frederik Ekvall, Thule’s director of product development for adventure camping, told me during my visit last November. At Thule's Test Center, I watched the Widesky tent, alongside virtually every other Thule product, endure the “Thule Test Program,” a series of lab tests engineered to simulate the most intense real-world conditions imaginable. In many cases, the process goes above and beyond global safety standards to meet Thule's own set of standards.

These exhaustive tests measure each product’s performance at every phase of development through exposure to extreme temperatures, water resistance, vibration, tensile shock, drop tests, corrosion, fatigue, impact, crash tests, windtunnels, UV, desert heat, and arctic cold. When all is said and done, all this durability testing equates to the amount of real-world usage a product might undergo if it were driven around the world twice; compressing years into days, and ultimately, into data that's used to guarantee safety, reliability, and performance.

This level of attention to detail is part and parcel of Thule’s design strategy—I lost track of the amount of times I heard the team say “safety” and “reliability” during my visit to the facility—something that I came to see was as Swedish as a cup of really strong coffee.

All the data gleaned through this extensive testing might seem like more than enough to certify a product, but for Ekvall and his team it's just the half of it. The team puts equal importance on metrics gathered from real-life moments putting the gear to use at home with family and friends or out in the field. That could look like Ekvall’s campout in the Swedish forest with the Widesky mounted on top and the Outset attached to the hitch, or as I keenly observed, the product managers who push their own kids around in early prototypes of new stroller designs (safely!). “I have to go out there and actually sleep in the tent to understand what we are dealing with—how else can I be trustworthy?” Ekvall said.

The Thule Metrics of Trustworthiness

Thule says its brand ethos adopts the Swedish design principles of “simplicity, durability, and trust” as its own, and they've guided product creation since the company started manufacturing rooftop cargo boxes in the 1960s. Thinking about Thule products—the company is probably best known for its cargo boxes and vehicle racks, but it also makes a wide range of outdoor gear—the first two, simplicity and durability, are obvious enough. These are values that have been synonymous with Scandinavian design since the 1954 Design in Scandinavia show introduced the world to the region’s modern style and craftsmanship during a three-and-a-half year-long tour of the U.S. and Canada. The landmark event displayed contributions by Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden to mid-century design with simple forms that combined aesthetic and functionality, and influenced a generation of designers in the process.

But trust, the third value, eluded me at first, with its implication that a purchase might be more personal than a mere transaction. So many companies deploy the language of trust that it's lost a lot of its heft. During my visit to the Thule headquarters, I saw the way engineers and designers in every category not only had a hand in developing gear but also tested it in their personal lives beyond HQ grounds. Beta testing prototypes at home and with family and friends was a norm, not some exception. Ekvall explained that while Thule could feasibly bring a new product to market within a year, they often take their time to allow for insights to emerge from an extended design process, like the time he and his colleagues followed a creative spark that led them to create a rough prototype of The Outset using wooden beams and bed linen.

“We build a prototype and start testing with simulations, but those are always assumptions,” Ekvall told me. “We don’t know exactly what will happen in reality.” Taking gear into the wild and letting life happen to it is a pivotal part of the development process, as it can reveal all the defects and pain points the team couldn’t have predicted. All the data is valuable (or "magnificent," in Ekvall's words), but taking the product home and inviting others to use it is key to making sure a product is worth making in the end. “Otherwise," he said, "we will not be a trustworthy outdoor company.”

In the case of the Outset, it was at a dinner party—not the Hillerstorp facility—that Thule identified a crucial weakness in the product. Ekvall's friends unexpectedly broke a prototype of the tent while attempting to unfold it without instruction. “They broke it in a way that we as engineers had not thought of,” he said.

Labs can't account for the total experience someone has with a product. “We get the subjective feeling and feedback from people testing gear, but we can’t measure that.” At the end of the day, Ekvall said, the experiential feedback is the most invaluable data. “That glint in your eyes when you’re in the tent—you are my proof of concept,” he told me.

Ekvall showing off his tent at the Thule Experience

Visiting Malmö and Hillerstorp showed me that Thule has found their own way of measuring the subjective experience of enjoying a product, and trusting—there’s that word again—it’s been designed well. Testing and prototyping is assumed of many if not all outdoor products, and while reviews provide a backstop, the final pact is ultimately between brand and buyer. Not everyone can travel to Sweden to visit HQ before they buy a new bike rack or tent. And the data-obsessed team at Thule certainly can’t measure that “glint in my eye,” but they can make real observations while they and others use the things they make in the field that let them confidently say you can trust their process. I don't expect the development behind everything I buy to include friends testing a prototype before dinner. But for Thule, this isn't a crazy notion.

With so many kitted-out rigs on display at the Thule Experience, I couldn't help but contemplate buying Thule's Widesky Tent for family adventures back home around Maine and New England once it comes out in April and I told Ekvall as much. “I have to make sure that you feel every cent you put into that product was worth it," he said. "So when you wake up in the morning with your kids, and you’re having a morning coffee in the tent, you think, 'Oh sh*t, this is my life.'”