T: Is that also around the time when you met Tom Herbst (Note: Former Arc’teryx CEO)?

E: Yes, we had been talking and he brought up the WaterTight zippers that you guys had, and actually offered to send me some. And not only did he send the zippers — which at the time you couldn’t get anywhere else — he also gave me a pattern for the zipper garage with instructions. And we’re still using them in the same way now. Our first project with it emerged in 2002, the Kit-1 jacket.

T: I’m curious to hear more about what interested you in functional design.

E: In general? Fundamentally… it’s about so many things. First of all, my parents were both architects and we never had babysitters so my brother and I grew up in the studio. They worked late hours so we’d be there all of the time messing around with the drafting equipment, always surrounded by architecture books. That definitely influenced our upbringing. The other part was martial arts. I was 10 when I started karate, and it was the first time I experienced apparel in the way that one outfit allowed me to do something that another outfit restricted. I drove my mom crazy for years buying pants — I was always throwing kicks in the changing rooms. Those are the main subconscious reasons I was attracted to function. But also because it’s just annoying to have things that don’t work.

T: From there, when did the Veilance project begin? Because it was quite a while after the first time that you met Tom.

E: Yes, I met Tom before Acronym even existed. We kept in touch and would see each other at ISPO, and he eventually came to visit our studio in Munich. He was always just curious about what we were up to. I later went to Vancouver to see him and brought some Acronym prototypes. I did our first product demo outside of our own studio on that trip to Tom and Tyler Jordan (Note: Former Arc’teryx CEO). I was a little nervous, I still remember. Tyler was the one who had the vision of a menswear line on the side of Arc’teryx. He reached out again in 2007 and we started discussing how I could help him set this brand up. There were only a few people in the company who understood the concept at the time, and part of our job was articulating that Veilance had a functional, legitimate problem to solve. Being in the city and being on a mountain is essentially the same thing but with different parameters.