A decade ago, Mike St. Pierre was an adventurous hiker who was frustrated with the ultralight backpacking gear on the market. So he began designing and making his own. Now his company, Hyperlite Mountain Gear, has a factory in an old textile mill in Biddeford, employs more than 30 people and is scrambling to find skilled workers to meet the demand for backpacks and tents.
“On the left side of the room this is all tent production,” Hyperlite Mountain Gear CEO Mike St. Pierre says. “Tents are a big part of our product offerings. And then the right side of the room is all backpack assembly.”
A tan and fit St. Pierre is looking over his production room, in Biddeford’s Pepperell Mill.
“These old mills are great,” he says. “They are really long narrow buildings, and it’s really great to be pushing products in the manufacturing environment down that long room.”
The company is just six years old, but growing quickly. It’s built a word of mouth reputation among thru-hikers on the Appalachian and Pacific Coast trails. Today there are 26 employees on the factory floor, cutting, sewing and packaging the gear. Nearly all of it is produced with Dyneema, a high-tech fabric originally designed for America’s Cup sails. It’s light, waterproof, tough as nails, and pricey. But it’s not easy to work with. And that’s part of the reason St. Pierre is building the products in the U.S.
“These materials are so new,” he says. “The techniques we use to manufacture our products — whether bonding or sewing or combinations of both — there’s really no one that was familiar with using these materials. So we developed our own techniques, and the last thing I wanted to do was to outsource that, and pass that knowledge along.”
Now the company is facing a new challenge — finding enough employees to operate those sewing machines. John Schafer is Hyperlite’s director of manufacturing. He says he’s looking for more employees, but they’re not easy to find.
“36% of the folks on this floor have been here five months or less,” says Schafer. “So what we’ve resigned ourselves to do is to build our own training cell, and we’re cycling people through as quickly as we possibly can.”
Schafer says this is part of a broader trend.
“We have lost a generation of machine operators,” he says. “And it’s not just in the sewing industry, it’s in all manufacturing, whether it’s in the heavy metal trades or in the fabric trades. All of our jobs have gone overseas, and it’s going to put a tremendous burden on our trade schools and our educational system, to get our workforce up to speed.”
Christa Baade of Coastal Enterprises Inc., says Hyperlite is not the only company looking for sewing machine operators.
“There are a lot of, particularly small, companies in southern Maine who are in need of skilled stitchers,” Baade says. “And we are in the position of having to build that work force, to grow our own.”
Baade has been working with Hyperlite and other southern Maine manufacturers to develop a program to train skilled textile workers.
St. Pierre says he sees plenty of room to grow the company, because many backpackers are lugging 30-50 pounds of gear, but could carry less, far less.
“My base weight, everything besides consumables—consumables being food water and fuel—my base weights average about 8 to 12 pounds, depending on the trip I’m going on, and if I’m in the shoulder seasons or not,” he says. “But three-season activities in the outdoors, if I’m just hiking, multi-day backpacking, doesn’t matter where I am in the world, between 8 to 12 pounds usually.”
St. Pierre says the gear’s popularity is based on a simple premise—most hikers want to travel light. And that’s keeping the sewing machines humming in Biddeford.