About SlingFin
SlingFin was founded in 2010 with one simple goal. Build the strongest, most innovative, no-expense-spared outdoor equipment in the world. It represents the sum total of founder Martin Zemitis’ three decades of experience in the outdoor industry. After designing for The North Face and Sierra Designs for around a decade he co-founded Mountain Hardwear, where he designed equipment until 2009. Eventually he began to desire more freedom to design without the constraints of price targets and decided it was time to take things in a new direction. Soon thereafter, SlingFin was born.
We started making high alpine-focused dream tents that people on Everest would use as windbreaks for other tents. After a while, we realized the demand for shelters that can stand up to the elements extends well beyond the high alpine. Since then we’ve kept the strength-to-weight ratio of our tents at the forefront of our product development process. We choose materials that improve the long-term durability of our products even if they’re more expensive, because we believe a good tent should be a long-term investment. Through thoughtful design, premium materials, and a deep understanding of tensile structures, we’ve created a full lineup of tents that can withstand much harsher conditions than other tents in their weight class.
SlingFin is an employee-owned, self-funded company. This means no suits, no “bean-counters”, and no pressure to maximize profit at the expense of quality. We’re small, lean, and scrappy, and we like it that way. We make the gear we want to use, not the gear a VC firm thinks will get them the best ROI. Our designs are inspired by our desire for stronger, lighter gear. We draw on our deep industry heritage and passion for the outdoors to ensure that the materials, attention to detail, and build quality of our products are impeccable.
Meet The Crew
SlingFin is a lifestyle business. Some people look down on that term, but we wear it with pride. We don’t want to be the biggest outdoor gear company out there; we just want to be the best. None of us followed traditional career paths, but we all ended up at SlingFin for two reasons:
- We want to make the best gear in the world.
- We want to actually have the time to play outside using the gear we make, with no bosses and no deadlines.
Martin Zemitis
Martin, SlingFin’s founder, is a four decade outdoor industry veteran. His career began in high school when he taught himself to sew gaiters, technical fanny packs, and other ski touring accessories. In 1982, he showed up unannounced at the North Face (which at the time was based in Berkeley) with samples of some of the ski accessories he had made, and asked for a job. They hired him as a sample sewer and pattern maker, and three months later he was moved to the design department where he worked on packs and sleeping bags until 1985. In 1987 he started working at Sierra Designs designing tents and sleeping bags. After Sierra Designs, some of his colleagues founded Mountain Hardwear, where he worked until 2009. He designed the tent Babu Chiri Sherpa used to camp at the summit of Mt. Everest in 1997, a feat that has still not been repeated. In 2009 Martin struck out on his own. He sequestered himself in a loft for a year with a sewing machine, design table, and fabric library and emerged in 2010 with the first prototype of our now-patented WebTruss. He founded SlingFin with the goal of making top-tier outdoor gear unconstrained by outside investors, price targets, or marketers. He approaches design from a user-first perspective: “Solving design problems for serious users has always interested me more than creating products to fill price buckets for retailers”. Since then, his tents have been to 8000m peaks, both the Arctic and Antarctic, and trails the world over. When he’s not at the studio, Martin can usually be found atop a raft or drift boat on a Wild and Scenic river somewhere in the West. Martin never takes vacations but he is often out “testing gear”.
Rich Ying
When asked about his outdoor interests, Rich says “I like doing stuff. Lots of stuff.” From backpacking to snowboarding to whitewater SUP-ing, Rich’s outdoor interests are as varied as his role at SlingFin. He’s a mechanical engineer by training, and worked for 12 years as Forensic Scientist doing expert witness work in accident reconstruction, premises liability and product liability cases. As his career progressed, he found that it became less and less about applying his technical skills in interesting, creative ways and more about having them used to win someone else’s argument or further their agenda (it’s not a coincidence that SlingFin doesn’t have a marketing department). He decided to move to the Bay Area and started looking for jobs in the outdoor industry. He sent Martin his résumé but little did he know, Martin doesn’t read résumés. So Rich showed up at the SlingFin studio, made his case, and convinced Martin to fish his résumé out of the recycling. Flash forward a few years, and Rich is SlingFin’s COO. In addition to operations and design, he makes sure that all aspects of the business are humming along as smoothly as can be reasonably expected, and helps keep the other (slightly less organized) 2/3 of the company on task.
Tim Hunt
Tim was dangerously close to applying to med school when he had an epiphany on a rainy afternoon in a shelter on the Appalachian Trail. Halfway into his second thru hike (after the Pacific Crest Trail the year before), he realized that extended outdoor adventures would be few and far between in his future if he didn’t make a change soon. Since he would have spent his doctor’s salary on outdoor gear anyway, he decided to cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. Like a stray dog, he showed up one day at the SlingFin studio and never left. Tim’s title is “A Good Guy to Know” and he does his best to live up to it as he works on design, product management, product videos, and customer service, among other things. He’s always looking for an excuse to get out on “product testing” trips of various genres and is mediocre to decent at pretty much every human-powered outdoor activity besides a select few.
Come say hi! You can drop us a line here.
