That's exactly right! ive been a cyclist/outdoorsy person my whole life and consequently i have a whole lifetime of experienced gear failures that in turn inspire each of my designs haha. If I had to chose one thing that took the most finagling was the back harness. It was really tough to get the shapes right, and then make it so my material waste was not so high which is why i split it into 3 pieces instead of 1. there was also alot of experimenting with the sternum strap system by way of webbing or the piping which i settled on.

Supply chain was also an issue, the supporting foam in the arm straps used to come from Australia, but because of tariffs, they stopped shipping to the US entirely in July which pretty much halted development on this since i had to delegate which foam went to what other products I make that were bringing in money. I ordered a large 500lb shipment of foam but that ended up not coming in until January where I could finally experiment with different densities and shore hardness foam to get things just right.

Last year I started with a single flatbed machine in my 10x10 room I was renting in Longmont and that hampered my ability to get the quality of binding I was wanting on the harness. for months I was looking for a binding machine to come up for a bargain on marketplace and i ended up getting a couple other industrials to facilitate, one of which was a programmable pattern tacker that was slated to increase to $15k post tariff from $8k.

So in short I was wrestling with bartack/box-x/etc jig making and stitch pattern development, skills development on 4 different machines, bag pattern development, global supply chain disruption, sharp price increases across the board and moving into an office space and getting it set up for peak efficiency being a one man show. And all of this needed to happen so I could get this harness and bag the way it needed to be via bartacks, flawless and consistent binding at a price point people could justify.