Founding NEMO

Cam Brensinger '98 has created a company that
is loved by outdoor enthusiasts and NASA, alike.

By Jay Heinrichs '77

Photograph by Chris Milliman
 

Imagine you're applying for a job at NEMO, a two-year-old startup that makes an innovative tent. You show up for the interview at a former rubber-boot factory in Nashua, New Hampshire, hard by the Merrimack River. You walk up a flight of stairs and meet your first problem: a white metal door, locked, with no bell. You see no sign except for the NEMO logo. It stands for New England Mountain Equipment Co., but the letters also signify landscape features: N and M for mountains, a squiggled E for river, O for water.



You hesitate to knock, because Cam Brensinger '98, the company's 28-year-old founder and inventor in chief, says he likes to hire innovators. If you could whip up a tiny robot to send under the door, he probably would offer you the job on the spot. Then again, "Nemoans"—about half a dozen employees, if you count interns and Cam's mother—are expected to draw their ideas, so you consider making a sketch of an entryway and shoving it under the door. But you can't draw.

You finally knock. One of the interns opens the door and leads you to a table where Cam and another worker are poring over what looks like a comic book. "The new manual for our tents," Cam explains. He wears jeans and looks indistinguishable from his fit young male coworkers, until you make eye contact. His eyes seem slightly off kilter . . . no, not that. They seem to operate independently, as if he takes in more than the rest of us do, which is probably true. ("Wide-angle vision," he will tell you, is one of his principles of management, along with such entrepreneurially contradictory traits as flexibility and persistence.) When he shakes your hand you notice his Popeye-sized forearms, the mark of a climber. He likes to play with his coworkers in and out of the office, which explains why the large open space contains a canted ladder with screwed-on holds for practicing ice climbing (a Cam invention).

He shows you his office cubicle and the one next to it, which his mom uses. She does the bookkeeping and on weekends races her yellow Porsche 993 RS Club Sport. She listens to Metallica. You wish your mom were half as cool.

He walks you past an industrial sewing machine into a cavernous unfinished space and whips out a Sako, one of a line of four "self-inflating" tents that went on the market last spring. The Sako has no poles, no fly, no moving parts at all, except for a tiny hand pump that Cam has designed to boost the air pressure from the user's lungs. He blows rapid small breaths into a tube while pumping with one hand, and, lo, the heap of high-tech fabric lying on the factory floor takes shape as a spacious two-person tent. The pump injects air into a set of parabolic bladders that become remarkably stiff. "The primary design parameter is to make the tent as easy to use as possible," Cam says, and he clearly succeeded. NEMO's tents earned it an innovation award from an international sporting goods association.

Ready for your employment test? Sure, you say. He sits you down with a pencil and paper and tells you to draw a … Wait, I promised not to tell. Anyway, it's a trick question. Next he asks you to describe the process of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as though you have just invented it and plan to manufacture thousands of sandwiches. "It measures a person's ability to define and communicate a process," he says, "so that anyone in our shop can go to the assembly department and help out."

And then comes the final test. You have to convince Cam and the others that you're a fun person to be around. It's a reasonable criterion, because the people at NEMO are around almost constantly. "With seven people we have to do everything a large company does," he says.

Fortunately, I don't have to pass any test—not that I would pass it. (Cam just takes me mountain biking along the Merrimack and fixes my chain when it breaks.) Still, I wish I could work at NEMO. I'd like to hang around and see what he comes up with next. Not only does this guy have more than 20 patents pending on his tents; he also intends to invent a different kind of company, one in which no one has a title and everyone has a hand in everything from computer-assisted design to marketing.

But his most ambitious invention, one still very much in progress, is Cam himself.

It started with Middlebury, where he majored in English and took a good dose of physics and studio art. "For four years the College let me do anything I wanted," he says. "I felt so comfortable there. It taught me to explore." In his sophomore year, he started a Mountain Club climbing group with some friends, taught a J-term class on mountaineering and survival, and developed a technical climber's approach to life.

To normal people, mountains are a challenge, and a smooth face of rock or ice constitutes an impossibility. A committed climber, on the other hand, considers mountains as alluring problem sets. It's no accident that a disproportionate number of mathematicians like to climb.

After he graduated from Middlebury, he and several classmates climbed Denali, and Cam went on to travel in India and Nepal. That was when he thought of starting an outdoor gear company. There was only one problem: he knew next to nothing about product design. He solved it by getting a second undergraduate education at the Rhode Island School of Design. He launched NEMO as his senior project.

While he was still a student, a group at MIT funded by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts hired him to help design the next generation of spacesuits. In 2004, Cam presented a new spacesuit concept to NASA's chief engineer. More skin than suit, it would bleed and even clot to repair itself. The work continues at NEMO, where, besides designing tents, the company is helping the MIT crew design and build "Bio-Suit" prototypes for future Mars colonists.

It occurs to me that NEMO's tents have a next-gen-spacesuit feel about them. I'm now in my backyard, lying in a Burrito, the company's one-person tent. I set it up in the rain by crawling into the formless material with my sleeping bag, and I stayed dry while I blew up the bladder. A minute later, a protective tube protected me from the hostile space outside. I stare at the trees out of the tent's polyurethane windows, fiddle with the interior-zippered vents, and admire the arch of sailcloth-covered "airbeams" overhead. The tent comprises a cluster of innovations, elegantly combined solutions to a backpacking problem set, and as I keep discovering the solutions around me, it feels as if the tent is inventing itself. Which, of course, is exactly what Cam has been doing since Middlebury: inventing himself.