____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Peak Design
Starting in photography, we expanded into travel, and now broadly cover what I would describe as adventure, with a wide variety of products that sit at the intersection of those three areas
Still, innovation does not come at the expense of ethics at Peak Design, and this is something Peter feels strongly about on a personal as well as a professional level. The company is currently nominating several of its factories for Fair Trade approval, a process that reflects a commitment to ensuring the people making its products are properly looked after.“ When I first visited a factory, early in the business, I already had parts on order but had never actually seen an injection molding or die-cast facility in person,” Peter recalls.“ But when you go to factories in Asia, you see the reality, and you see families doing repetitive work because of the simple luck, or lack thereof, of where they were born. If you are a business owner and that does not register with you or you do not care about that, I think it shows a real lack of empathy. Fair Trade has emerged as one of the most scalable and credible ways of making working conditions better for factory employees and ensuring they are well cared for, and to me it is a no-brainer. It may cost more and chip away at the bottom line, but it is what our customers expect of us, and more importantly, it is what we expect of ourselves. We would not be comfortable doing it any other way,” he concludes.
Through this approach, Peak Design proves that it is entirely possible to build a profitable business while treating factory workers with the dignity they deserve. ■
www. peakdesign. com
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