About Tony’s Vault:
Before RUX became a company, it was a collection of questions, experiments and observations from founder and designer Tony Richardson. Early on, he documented the prototypes and design principles that ultimately shaped the brand’s products and systems. This series revisits those early explorations to uncover the ideas that continue to guide RUX today.
RUX Starts to Take Shape
By the summer of 2019, after recognizing that The Problem With Gear Isn’t Gear, RUX product designer Tony Richardson began figuring out what a better gear system would need to do. It was time for him to stop thinking about the problem in abstract terms and start making physical models.
Rather than spending months trying to create the perfect solution on paper, he headed to the local Walmart and bought a plastic storage bin, cut it apart and combined the lid with the material from a dry bag. It didn’t look much like the product that would eventually become RUX, but it gave Tony something more useful than a drawing: a physical object he could iterate upon.
The fundamental challenge quickly became clear: How do you combine the flexibility of fabric with enough structure to make the box stand open by itself?
Finding the Right Combination
Tony knew how to explore unfamiliar design problems. He had spent nearly nine years at Arc'teryx working on everything from gloves to footwear to climbing harnesses. Most of that design work started with a clean slate and access to a huge variety of materials, so it’s safe to say he could handle turning an ambiguous idea into a refined solution.
Trina Thompson, Tony’s longtime partner, brought another important set of skills to the process. Her experience in pattern making, materials and color—combined with a highly organized approach to development—helped keep the soon-to-be growing number of prototypes cataloged. Together, they could move quickly because they knew how to turn questions into physical mock-ups and evaluate them.
With the structural challenge identified, Tony attacked the problem from almost every direction. He layered traditional fabrics, hoping that enough material could give the box the strength to stand upright on its own. He experimented with sailcloth woven with carbon fiber, which had a plastic-like feel and offered more structure than conventional fabrics. Each approach taught him something, but none provided the solution he was looking for.
He also explored structure from the opposite direction, bending aluminum into rectangular rims and testing different ways to incorporate them into the soft-sided construction. At the same time, he went deep into plastics, experimenting with 3D printing and injection molding for the first time. The goal was to understand what different materials and manufacturing methods could contribute, while narrowing the possibilities for how the box could take shape.
Outside vendors also became part of the process, although those experiments ultimately led Tony and Trina to bring the development back in-house. The number of prototypes continued to grow as components were swapped, reshaped and rebuilt as different ideas were tested.
The process rarely moved in a straight line. A different fabric would change the structural requirements and a new rim would affect how the box opened. A construction method that solved one problem could create another somewhere else. Each iteration narrowed the possibilities and brought the emerging design closer to the combination of materials, structure and proportions that would eventually become RUX.
The Rabbit Holes Get Deeper
The physical prototypes were only one part of the exploration. Tony also started looking outside the outdoor industry for ideas about storage, manufacturing and how physical objects move through the world.
Lean manufacturing raised questions about efficiency and unnecessary steps. Intermodal transportation offered examples of standardized containers designed to move between different systems. Research into van life provided another perspective on making limited space work efficiently. These subjects had little obvious connection to an outdoor gear storage box, but each offered a principle that could be applied to problems Tony was trying to solve.
As he went down these different rabbit holes, he realized that one useful question could lead somewhere completely unexpected. Sometimes it produced an idea worth testing, other times it eliminated an entire direction he previously thought held promise. The value was in following the question far enough to find out. That mindset kept the process open while the fundamental design was still taking shape.
Learning From the Real World
The prototypes needed to leave the workshop. Tony brought new versions to climbing crags where he could put them in front of people who would actually use them. Friends became early testers, loading the prototypes with gear and providing feedback based on how they behaved in real situations.
Skier Eric “Hoji” Hjorleifson became another useful sounding board. He used some of the prototypes, and offered his perspective on what was working and what wasn't. Just as importantly, Hoji had a small shop with a CNC machine and lathe, giving Tony access to tools that allowed different ideas to be explored and modified.
Hundreds of Versions, One Direction
The prototypes continued to evolve through 2019 and into 2020 as Tony experimented with different fabrics and structural components. The goal was to find the right balance between flexibility and rigidity while making something that was practical to store, carry and use.
Size became another important variable. Tony and his friends tested a range of dimensions before settling on 70 liters as the sweet spot. It was large enough to hold plenty of gear while remaining small enough to comfortably move around. That size also happened to align well with standard storage-unit dimensions, giving the box a practical relationship to the spaces where people already kept their gear.
A philosophy was developed that every iteration was a prototype, which made the development process feel endless. There were more than a hundred versions, with something new changing every few days. Some experiments became promising directions while others were quickly discarded. Even after the team began working with a factory, prototypes continued to reveal problems that needed to be solved.
One of the longest-running challenges was getting the box to stand open by itself. The search for the right structural solution continued through several more iterations, eventually leading to experiments with spring steel, similar to the material inside a tape measure or a child's snap bracelet.
From Exploration to V1
By early 2020, the original storage bin lid/dry bag prototype had evolved into a much more refined product. Tony and Trina were working through materials, molds and manufacturing considerations while prototypes continued to make their way into the hands of countless adventurers, remote construction workers and mountain guides up and down the Sea to Sky corridor of western B.C.
After months of experimentation, the basic architecture of the product was beginning to settle into place. The materials, proportions and construction methods were more defined, while the feedback from real-world use helped identify the remaining problems that needed to be solved before production.
The next stage required a different kind of thinking. With the possibilities narrowing, Tony had to make decisions about which ideas would move forward and which ones would be left behind.
Next up is Tony’s Vault - Part III: The Pursuit of Clarity. As RUX moved toward production, Tony began turning the lessons from hundreds of experiments into design principles that would define the product and the larger RUX system.
