Most are not famous, just passionate about the outdoors. Marmot has set up a system where its staff of designers meets and listens carefully to these early adopter product users. The Design Board members describe and discuss the places and situations that require new solutions to the issues of personal movement, comfort, protection and safety in the outdoors. This system collects, quantifies, collates, analyzes and simplifies these problems, integrates new technologies, produces new solutions and generates prototypes for testing. The company then makes prototypes, early and often, and begins field-testing.
Marmot can prototype nearly any idea in-house.
Many new ideas do not work at all. Others fail after serious testing. A few are good ideas that come back from testing with suggestions for improvement. Revised prototypes are constructed. A very few become new products.