Blog

We have disappointing news. We are postponing our Cnoc poles Kickstarter campaign due to some unsolved issues in the supply chain that impact our ability to deliver the poles in due time. We hope to solve them in the next month and relaunch in mid-September. The problems are: 1. The engineering company that is making the heat transfer machine to decorate the tubes is missing a few key parts that will take several weeks to make. They can't fulfill the August deadline for us and we probably won't have a working machine until later in the year. 2. Problems with cork stock levels in...

  Nice landing. Is there something familiar about that helicopter? We have some really cool news about our manufacturing partner Goodwinds Composites! Along with them making our carbon fiber tubes for our new Cnoc trekking poles, they are also providing parts for the landing gear of NASA's first helicopter on Mars, scheduled for launch in 2020. The helicopter will prove the "viability of heavier-than-air vehicles flying on another planet" and deliver beautiful high resolution color photos of the stark red landscape. That's big news for a company in a little town like Mt. Vernon. We couldn't be more excited to...

Our Kickstarter is live! When I started Cnoc Outdoors in 2016, my plan was to make the best carbon poles on the market. We began by making the Vertex poles, in the same way as everyone else—sourcing from China, where the infrastructure and supply chains are already firmly established. But because we were (and still are) such a small company, we couldn’t monitor quality assurance in the factory and had constant issues with the poles. In the summer of 2017, we got another batch that had a number of QA issues: breaking around the button, bonding issues, etc. We had a bunch of ideas on how to improve...

Deb Malkin is a fat-positive massage therapist from the Bay Area who hiked Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania this March with the Curvy Kili Crew, a group of 20 plus-sized adventuresome women.