TeamO team ethos
Each day we come in and make the best quality lifejackets that you can rely on if the worst should happen. The responsibility of that sentence is something we constantly think about. If the worst should happen, the standards we put in place every day will help ensure safety and possibly even survival of someone who ends up in the water in our lifejacket. That is a lot to take on board.
There can be no 'made at 4pm on a Friday' attitudes when it comes to safety products. It has to perform. It has to be made right. To do this we only use the best performance materials, that are ISO certified from audited suppliers.
We cut carefully (with a laser for pinpoint accuracy). We employ the best sewers and makers we can find. Gill and Lou have been with us for nearly two years and their experience is second to none. If you need someone to sew a small, fiddly, complicated shape, these two are your first port of call. Cat joins us when she can and helps us to fulfill your orders (but she also has her own cool sailing plans going on which we're excited to watch developing)
We are also working with a third party manufacturing supplier who does some of the non-technical sewing stages because we can't keep up with demand if we start from scratch in-house anymore.
Oscar is our Head of Design. It was his original idea for a lifejacket that could turn the wearer face-up if they went overboard whilst clipped on that eventually turned in to our award-winning BackTow Lifejacket Deckharness that so many sailors trust and choose for their crew today. Oscar and our ISO test partners cover the quality control side of things too.
We check, sample, test and retest continuously. Oscar literally knows how many stitches there are in every lifejacket, how much weight a buckle is designed to take and he is constantly seeking new ways to improve and develop our range. Sometimes that means just getting on a boat and going sailing in your own product.
Lauren covers the sales and marketing side of things. In the beginning no one had heard of a BackTow lifejacket before and so we set out to educate the market about why being BackTowed was important (short answer: face up = breathing = good. face down = drowning = bad). From time to time we have other people drafted in to help when we have projects on .
We are a small team, but a passionate one. We can't make as many lifejackets every week as some of our competitors, but we are the only ones who can make a BackTow Lifejacket. We think that's important. We plan to keep doing what we're doing, turning up every day to make top notch lifejackets you can rely on, and designing the next big thing (and you should see Oscar's design notebook. There are some wild innovation ideas waiting to burst off those pages.)
We're always happy to talk about lifejackets, and even happier to talk about what you're planning to do whilst wearing our lifejackets - our customers end up in some pretty cool places around the world. Please keep tagging us in your social media posts when you're out on the water, or tell your dock neighbour about BackTow and why they should consider it.
Last month we launched the Coastal BackTow Lifejacket. This is a new model that combines our patented BackTow harness in to a smaller lifejacket without a sprayhood or a light that is specifically designed for sailors who are doing shorter offshore sailing trips (ie, maybe one overnight passage in coastal waters compared to a longer time offshore when you might be crossing an ocean) This allows Coastal sailors to access BackTow technology at a lower price. The Coastal is ISO approved for use in offshore conditions, and customers can choose to purchase the sprayhood and light separately and install these themselves if they wish to upgrade to the full Offshore package later on without having to buy an entire new lifejacket.