Putting a brave face on winter

It was the paper face mask on the Ace Hardware shelf that really got the Sullivan family thinking.

John Sullivan III, a 26-year-old Missoula outdoor enthusiast who spends half his year in Whitefish skiing or in West Glacier guiding whitewater raft trips, was tired of ordinary face masks falling short in the protection arena on the ski slopes.

He perhaps has a little tougher mug than his sisters and fellow skiers, Sara and Katie Sullivan - or chalk it up to his beard, if you wish. But frigid mountain air bites into their faces even more than his. Typical fleece neck-and-face gaiters fog their goggles.

Everyone wanted a solution that would let them stay out longer.

So when that paper mask showed itself, dad, son and daughters got their creative juices flowing on a better ski mask.

"We started figuring out what we could do to create our own," the young Sullivan said.

Three years later, the family has incorporated its Talus Outdoor Technologies company and plunged head-first into marketing its first product, the ColdAvenger.

Its catch phrase? Stay Out Longer.

With endorsements from a world-class mountain climber, Iditarod mushers and the U.S. Olympic Committee - not to mention a buy-out offer from a leading ski apparel manufacturer and sell-outs at two trade shows - the high-tech cold-weather face mask is traveling in the right circles.

It's been to Siberia where University of Montana graduate student Clay Smith studies Siberian tigers in winter. It went to Antarctica when University of Delaware fine arts student Alyssa Crawford photographed wildlife.

It went heli-skiing with Fred Noble of Canadian Mountain Adventures. It ascended Mount Kilimanjaro on the faces of U.S. Olympic Committee members.

Ed Viesturs, the first American to summit all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter mountains without bottled oxygen, will wear it during a Canadian Arctic sled dog race.

Iditarod athlete John Stetson wore it as he finished second in the Beargrease 400, the longest sled-dog race in the Lower 48, and will wear it in this year's running of the Iditarod.

It will be on the face of Rachael Scdoris when the legally blind Oregon musher races off through the Alaskan wilderness on the first leg of the Iditarod this week.

And St. Louis-based Hanneke Hardware & Industrial Supply, a $3 billion construction supply company, added the mask to its products protecting outdoor workers from wintry weather.

ColdAvenger - Sullivan deferred on the name choice to his dad, an Arizona toxicologist, and to their other Talus investors - is a strip of waterproof, microfleece-lined, soft-shell fabric that wraps around the neck, ears, cheeks and chin, and is fitted with a medical-grade plastic ventilator that covers the nose and mouth.

Looking a little like Darth Vader-meets-Imperial Stormtroopers, ColdAvenger wearers hit the slopes and cold-weather work sites at full speed. The plastic ventilator captures 5 percent of the moisture in each exhaled breath, humidifying the next inhaled breath and avoiding damaged airways from dry, cold air.

"A high percentage of cold-weather athletes, or just outdoor people, develop cold-weather-induced asthma" from the severe cold they're in and the hard work they're doing, Sullivan said.

"In my opinion, that is the major benefit of this product. You can breathe totally normal and maintain a high level of activity."

It also sets the family skiers apart from the rest of the ski-and-snowboard crowd. Sullivan saw it in icy temperatures when others were huddled in the lift lines, miserably cold and barely talking.

"We were over there playing, having a great time. And people noticed," he said.

The end result was fun, but it didn't come easily.

After the paper face mask encounter, they realized the pivotal innovation would be their ventilator.

They worked with Randy Wills of In Time Innovation outside Missoula, a contract manufacturer who specializes in the medical field. The Sullivans came up with their idea, Wills built the tool to mold the plastic, then produced a ventilator from a silicone mold.

All Seasons Apparel sewed it to fabric, they all went skiing, identified the flaws, reworked the idea and came out with the next generation.

"We had to change the size, the ergonomics, the design and placement and size and shape of the vents" several times over, Sullivan said. When it was perfected, Liberty Tool outside Coeur d'Alene struck a permanent metal mold and started producing ventilators in earnest.

Their quest for a high-tech fabric that is extremely windproof and waterproof, has a soft shell and is soft against the skin, and has the right amount of stretch for a good fit was arduous, too. They went through months without a steady supply of the fabric, but finally landed on Emerald Citi Textile in Seattle.

"At first we just did it all just to benefit ourselves," he said. "Then one day a guy on the slopes offered me $90 for my mask."

That's when they decided to think bigger.

As it happened, no sooner had they incorporated last June and applied for their patent than Chaos Thermal Regulation, a giant in the industry, made a buy-out offer that would have covered only their costs to date. They declined.

"That was a good indicator to us that we had something that would sell," he said, not just a ski mask that worked.

They fired up production and reserved a booth at Seattle's SkiFever and Snowboard Expo on Oct. 26. They sold out the second day, took orders only by the third day, ramped up production again and repeated the performance a week later at Portland. They followed the next weekend with a show at Denver and haven't slowed down since.

All told, Sullivan said Talus has sold about 1,500 ColdAvengers and has the materials on hand to produce another 5,000. Annual production will depend on orders, he said.

Their three years of research and development tapped into the elder Sullivan's medical connections and much of the younger Sullivan's college education.

But the latter's experience guiding raft trips and working in retail at Sportsman's Warehouse gave him the best on-the-ground lessons for the business world.

Case in point: Make the bag of medical-grade plastic that passes OSHA standards at work sites where wearers reuse masks daily, supply a place to write their name for long-term use, make it look different from any other company's bag and punch a hole so it hangs on a hook instead of being piled on a store shelf.

They tried to keep all supply and production in Montana, but resorted to the "100-mile rule" to find a sewing factory; the fabric source stretches that a bit, Sullivan admitted. Cost is higher than offshore production, but the $49.95 price tag is well worth the local jobs, he said.

New developments are under way - signature models for endorsing athletes, a custom design for Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents. And they're giving samples to key people and organizations nationally with an eye toward cultivating future business.

For now, Sullivan, as the only company employee, runs the business out of his Missoula home. Zoning doesn't allow him to deliver the physical product from there so storage and quality control are handled at In Time Innovation. Sullivan delivers locally sold masks to individual buyers himself.

They know it's an investment in time.

"As much as we'd like to make enough money to support me," he said, "we really mostly want to support the athletes and the industry - and keep ourselves skiing."

On the Web, check out www.talusoutdoortech.com or e-mail them at info@talusoutdoortech.com

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com