When Rosie O’Sullivan gets talking about outdoor gear, she quickly steers the conversation to people. Often, the subject is the team of innovators and testers she works with. Most importantly, it’s the everyday women and men who will rely on specific products in the outdoor spaces that give them joy.
As the Head of New Product Innovation at Pentland Brands, O’Sullivan’s portfolio now includes Speedo, Endura, and Berghaus, where she got her start. The storied British outerwear brand is also where O’Sullivan led the team behind Berghaus’s revolutionary ZonalAdapt leggings, a women-first rethink of performance apparel shaped by science, anatomy, and feedback from more than 100 field testers. Our chat with Rosie covered all of that, starting with the power of listening.
GearJunkie: Is being Head of New Product Innovation as creative and fun as it sounds?
Rosie O’Sullivan: Yeah, it’s fun. It’s a fun responsibility. Our strain of innovation is based around solving for real people who just love doing what they’re doing, getting outside, spending time in nature. The responsibility is to those people, and it’s a privilege to make that experience better for them in any way we can. The fun part is spending time with people doing what they love.
You must spend a lot of time in the field.
Yes, and I get a bit stressed out if I spend too much time in the office, because the office can become quite quickly an echo chamber of your own thoughts, and your own experiences, and your own opinions. The fastest way to burst that bubble is to get outside and spend time with people who are doing it for real.
You’ve said gear development at Berghaus starts with listening to real people who will use the kit. How so?
The thing about listening is you’re listening to what people say, but you’re also listening to what they don’t say. People can become so desensitized to a problem that they can’t even recognize it anymore. We see that with women especially, who become very used to wearing gear that was not designed truly for their bodies.
If you ask a woman about her clothing, she won’t blame the clothes. She’ll blame her body. A man will just say, “This gear is rubbish.”
And yet most outdoor gear is designed for men and later adapted for women. There’s even a catchphrase for it, ‘shrink it and pink it.’
The fact is that this world is built for men, and if the gear doesn’t fit you — and we see this over cycling, over swimming, over hiking — the knock-on effect is for women to think this sport isn’t for me, or this activity isn’t for me.
Is it satisfying to turn that paradigm around?
Yeah, hugely. The outdoors has helped so many women to overcome huge grief, loss, divorce, family issues. It’s helped them be better moms, be better friends. So it’s a huge privilege to be able to sit in a room and say, “How do I make your access to this space better?”
My whole team is so passionate about it. I could get on my soapbox about that, actually.
I’m glad you brought up the team, because product design — especially the way Berghaus goes about it — is a collaborative process, isn’t it?
We get everyone in a room, and there’s an expectation for you to own not just your slice of the pie but the product as a whole. We try to empower people to come up with ideas, try new things, and, most importantly, empower them to fail.
Because if you feel like you’ve got to get it right every single time, then you’re never going to try something truly innovative. So yes, it’s all about the team culture, and it’s incredible to work for a brand that genuinely champions that approach inside out.
How do you bring the product from those shared ideas to the trail?
We’ve got rapid prototyping centers in London and the U.S. that are fully kitted out to make anything, from base layers to shells. It means that our designers can work hand in hand with our technologists to get every detail right.
Berghaus famously guarantees its kit for life. How do you ensure every piece is ready for the toughest environments on the planet, or just years of regular use?
We have a test squad of about 1,000 people across the U.K. who can actively try every piece of kit in the right environment and the right challenge level, whether that be in the Peak District or Scotland or Wales. Because it’s only really worth its mettle when you put it back in front of people.
This article is sponsored by Berghaus.
