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Self-Inflating Tent

The New Hampshire native entered Middlebury College in Vermont in 1994 and majored in English, where he also fostered interests in both physics and art. There he also began taking more seriously his affinity for climbing; he started a climbing club and taught a class on mountaineering and survival. Upon graduation from Middlebury in 1998, he traveled to Alaska where he climbed Denali, then to India and Nepal, where the idea struck him for the first time that perhaps he could improve on the outdoor gear that was available to adventurers like him by starting an outdoor gear company of his own.

When he returned home, he faced the reality that it was time to get a job. However, office politics and life in a cubicle did not appeal to him, so, he and a friend put together a business plan for an outdoor equipment company that made his rough idea suddenly look feasible. He lacked a background in product design, however. He set out to solve that problem by heading back to school.

Brensinger graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a B.A. in industrial design in 2002 and spent all the time he could there developing ideas for outdoor equipment and sporting goods products. By the time he was a RISD senior, he had fleshed out his idea for NEMO Equipment, (originally, New England Mountain Equipment). He launched the company in April of 2002 just before his RISD graduation and moved the business into a former boot factory building in Nashua, New Hampshire, that summer.

NEMO's first line of products would be next-generation tents, Brensinger decided, because he had confidence in the innovative ideas he had for that market and he knew that if he could find success with tents, his company would gain credibility that would help the firm move into other product areas. He noted that the products in this marketplace were virtually the same across a number of brands and had not changed much in years. His tents, however, would be like none that anyone had seen before. His would be "self-inflating."

Brensinger spent the first two years at NEMO perfected the firm's AirSupported Technology (TM). Tents using this technology have no poles, no fly, and no moving parts. They are equipped with small hand or foot pumps that the user can use along with breathing into a tube that quickly and easily helps the tent "inflate" into a stiff, stable form. Their ability to stay stiff is based on the concept of using pressurized air inside high-tech fabric to create the tent's infrastructure.

NEMO demonstrated the tents for the first time at the Summer Market Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Utah, in August, 2004. The concept was met with immediate critical success; NEMO was featured in the "Best of Show" section of the OR Daily publication, and shortly thereafter, in 2005, the firm won the ISPO BrandNew Award. Many other awards and honors followed, including a Design Distinction from ID Magazine for the firm's "Sako" tent model; and the "Bottom Line Design Award" from Business 2.0 and Frog Design. NEMO's tents were also included in Time Magazine's Most Amazing Inventions of 2005 issue. Team NIKE/Balance Bar also asked NEMO to co-develop a tent for adventure racing.

Brensinger has more than 20 patents pending on his tents, which began selling in limited quantities via the firm's Web site in 2005 and as of 2006, are available from retailers across the United States. Meanwhile Brensinger, who, while at RISD, began working with a group to help design next-generation spacesuits for NASA, continues to develop more new tent ideas as well as a variety of other products inside and outside the outdoor gear arena, including rescue boats and aerospace products. He and his firm are also sought after for consulting work in a variety of fields.

[August 2006]