Mark Tsigounis launches the Hibear Outdoors Adventure Flask [EP 234‪]‬ Outdoor Biz Podcast

Mark Tsigounis and I talk about where he got the idea for an Adventure Flask, it's functionality, and how the Hibear Adventure Flask came to life.
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It’s been a couple of years since we caught up at Outdoor Retailer right?
Yeah, it was Summer OR 2019. That was my first outdoor retailer show, and completely eyeopening. If anybody's in the industry and you haven't gone yet, you need to go it's amazing. 
It's pretty phenomenal. And you were just kind of walking around, you had a sample, just getting feedback and stuff. How did that go? Obviously you got a lot of positive feedback, so here you are.
Yeah, I mean, I felt like I was almost like pirating the show. I didn't have a booth. I kinda like went rogue. I plopped down next to the cafe downstairs and was just trying to show what we had created to as many people as possible.
 
How did you get introduced to the outdoors? You did a lot of stuff in the Navy I'm sure. But what was your first outdoor experience like?
Well, I grew up in New Jersey and I don't think most people think of New Jersey as being an outdoor hub. Most people think of, you know, exit 10 Elizabeth and all the refineries out there, or the second city to New York. But North Jersey is actually a pretty beautiful place and we have 80 miles of the Appalachian Trail that run through there. So my dad used to bring me out there and when you're a young kid, it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that this trail actually goes from Georgia to Maine. And I said . . . wait, so you're telling me if I keep going North, I'm going to go all the way up almost to Canada? So I think that always resonated with me.
 
What made you want to hike the trail? 
I think that too much time in a desk job when you're a free-spirited individual, you have these ideas that were planted in your mind start to grow roots. And I think that's just, just something I couldn't get out of my head. I think it was in 2014 that my desk job just started wearing on me and it was just time for a change. And that was kind of like a rebirth. So I wanted to leave my desk job. I had worked in finance for 12 years at that point
That'll do it. You have an impressive adventure background. Was that the inspiration was to hang up the desk job and go play, or did you grow up doing some of those things with the family?
Yeah, I grew up, spending a lot of time on the Jersey shore. My dad brought me camping a few times, but I never really loved it. I loved video games. I used to always play manhunt in the neighborhood and I’d ride my bike everywhere for sure.
 
Where did the idea for an adventure flask come from?
When you're a through hiker on the Appalachian trail, you're used to carrying everything on your back. And you learn that the stuff that does more are the things that you value a lot more than the other things, like multipurpose stuff. I spent some time in Africa where I got an insulated bottle. So when it's 115 degrees outside, it's pretty amazing that you can have ice cold water all day. And I had no idea that this thing existed. And back then I had an Amazon business for a little bit and the writing was on the wall that I needed to start my own brand.
I lived by coffee, right? I was just always working and led by coffee. Originally it was a French press and then we were thought, well, this is kind of boring. An insulated French press idea led to let's do something a lot cooler. So we came up with this idea. This concept of one flask with seven interchangeable tops. We did a bunch of 3D printing and we'd get all these parts. We had about 140 parts delivered to us. And we thought this is totally not going work, for a lot of different reasons. I mean, can you imagine just having this mechanism in your backpack and how much space that would actually take up? It's just not rational. So we took the summer and real