May 4, 2009 – ‘We’re going to surprise a lot of people’

By Karin Gelschus
Associate Editor
Tired of holding his son’s bike for him halfway up a ramp, Mike Pratt wondered how one person could more easily load it. After 15 minutes of brainstorming, he quickly sketched out a model.
That product, the Step Up, is one of two products that will break OGIO International into the powersports industry’s hard parts segment when its shipped to dealers in June.
It certainly wasn’t Pratt’s first invention.
In the early 1980s, the then 19-year-old Pratt was flown to meet officials from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola over an idea that years later would become a standard in every automobile sold in the United States: a cup holder.
The deal — for a McHolder —didn’t pan out, but Pratt did sell it in auto accessory stores. Years later, he and OGIO made it big with a locker bag. He expanded the bag into a full product line and eventually into a number of different industries, including travel, motocross, snowboarding, baseball, skateboarding, surfing, laptops, school packs and golf bags.
The latter industry OGIO expanded into in 1998. “Who needs another golf bag?” Pratt, now the OGIO CEO, was asked at the time. “You’re crazy.”
Now a leader in the golf industry, OGIO has made its way into the powersports industry.
OGIO has been making bags for the powersports industry since 2001 and since then has experienced double digit percentage sales growth, says Brian Bott, national sales manager of OGIO.
The release of the 180 Moto Stand and the Step Up is OGIO’s debut of hard goods.
“We’re going to grow tremendously because we’ve entered the hard goods market,” Bott said. “We’re going much deeper and much wider. Just with what we’ve launched, that’s going to match our (soft goods) sales.”
The company has seen double-digit sales percentage growth nearly every year since it began, Bott says.
“’08 was the first year we weren’t up in double-digits company wide,” he noted. “We barely missed double-digits. We had 8 or 9 percent growth for ‘08.”
The company’s success can be traced back to Pratt’s first big hit — a locker bag.
“I started out as a one-hit wonder,” Pratt said, but continued, “You can’t just rest on one.”
Determined not to be a one-hit-wonder, he plans to expand that hard goods line considerably by next spring.
“We’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Pratt said. “I’m looking at a wall of probably eight new things that are all based around aluminum. There is a lot more we can do to that world.”
Product is the foundation of OGIO, and that’s where Pratt keeps his focus. “The heart and love of this company is product first,” he said. “I’m not going to let anything else be put in front of it.”
Behind the product is a design team that aims to bring Pratt’s ideas to life. Although Pratt says the business side of his brain clicks in when deciding which ideas to follow through with, it’s the whole process of designing that drives his passion.

The design team
Annoyances spark Pratt’s ideas.
“I remember going ‘What else bothers me?’” he said after deciding to get into hard parts in the powersports industry. “Within minutes I thought that motorcycle stand bothers me. Every time I pull up (into my garage) I have to lift my bike onto a stand. ‘Why don’t I just use the momentum of the bike to somehow create lift?’”
Pratt’s next idea — the 180 Moto Stand — was in motion. The stand works by the rider pushing the bike forward, and as the front tire rolls through the framework, the stand rotates 180 degrees, engages and lifts the bike onto the stand. To take the bike off, the rider pulls the bike back and the OGIO 180 will reverse the motion.
While Pratt spearheads most of the ideas for OGIO’s products, he says there are always a lot of fingerprints on every one.
“I’m not responsible for any one of anything to the completion. We have a good team,” he said. “If someone says, ‘Mike, it’s just incredible you did that.’ If I ever said thank you without acknowledging that it was a team effort, I feel like I’d be taking away from so many people who helped.”
There are 10 members, including Pratt, who make up the OGIO design team. Pratt says each of the team members must check their egos, pride and arrogance at the door because it’s the ideas that are most important, not who came up with them.
“Really what matters is at the end of the day,” Pratt said, “is we’re sitting here with a piece that the market goes, ‘Wow that’s cool.’”
To get to that point, OGIO goes through a challenging phase. “Sometimes it’s discouraging,” Pratt said. “Often times it means backing up and saying, ‘Maybe we went down the wrong path. The concept we’re trying to make happen will work, but maybe there’s another way we have to approach it. What is the solution because there is always a solution?’”
The process can be exhausting.
“I’ll go home to my wife sometimes and feel beat up and burnt out for the day,” Pratt noted. “I wouldn’t want to do anything else, but you’re constantly pushing. When you’re trying to create a wake with a boat, you’re pushing, you’re always pushing against the resistance.”
A lot of times, that resistance is convincing other people of a concept, Pratt adds.
“You’re trying to be the eternal optimist and trying to find solutions out of thin air,” he added. “There are plenty of people who don’t have vision and can’t really see where it’s going until it’s finished and then they go, ‘Oh that’s a great item. I’d buy that.’ You’re like, ‘Yeah but you said you hated it three weeks ago.’”
Ambition and determination are positive traits, but when is it time to say a product just isn’t going to work?
“I don’t know,” Pratt said. “A gut feeling I guess. I think I have enough belief in what I feel in my heart. I know sometimes I’m going to be wrong and sometimes I’m going to be right. But hopefully I’m right more than I’m wrong and that’s good enough.”
It’s never enough, however, when it comes to inventing new products. Pratt has no limit on the number of products he wants to create or how much he wants the company to grow.
“I’d absolutely be in heaven if I had a team of 30 designers, or 50, and we were all just cranking at it to find solutions for things,” he said. “I have a file 3 feet deep full of concepts. A lot of them I just have to park for the time being.”
The ideas just keep coming and Pratt can’t seem to stop them. It doesn’t matter where he is, his brain is constantly buzzing.
“I’m a sick person, you need to know that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what world I’m in, I’m always looking at everything. I feel like I could jump into almost anything and wonder why it’s doing it that way.
“I was working on the 180 (stand). I didn’t want it to look like I just had a one-hit wonder idea so I better start scanning for other opportunities,” he continued. “So now I’m paying really close attention to other items that are irritating me. I have to do that fast.
“One thing I figured out was the Step Up. I had two things to go to the show with so I don’t look like, ‘Hey we’re a bag company and by the way I came out with a stand.’ It worked. We have huge interest in us right now.”

The development of OGIO
Pratt’s “sickness” has been evident since he was young.
“I knew in junior high school I loved design,” he said. “I knew by high school I was going to invent things. That’s kind of a funny word, especially in high school. We’re innovating things. I’ve always, always loved it.”
Just after high school, before cars came with cup holders, Pratt invented one that hung on the door, but it was a collapsible holder that retracted with a push of a button.
“I had Nissan interested in it,” Pratt said. “Coca-Cola flew me to Atlanta.”
That was just the beginning.
Pratt moved onto a variety of other things, including children’s toys and more products for the auto industry. “I was doing just about anything for people to make some money,” Pratt said.
Pratt used to spend hours in his parents’ garage working on different projects. His girlfriend at the time, Jana, now wife of 25 years, would sit and wait for him to finish whatever it was before they went out for the night. “We laugh at that today,” he said.
Pratt’s persistence and drive paid off when he created a gym bag designed to sit upright so it could fit in a locker. Even though he had ideas for other products besides bags, he stuck with soft goods in the beginning as a business strategy.
“I like going out and looking at the market, strategically thinking about it, not just the product but what the game is,” Pratt said. “How are we going to go in, build a brand and dominate? What kind of buzz are we going to create?”
Pratt says part of the strategic planning is showing samples of preliminary products to OGIO’s sales team and some of the company’s key buyers to get feedback. They help determine what concepts to follow through with by determining which ones will sell well.
OGIO’s products reflect its customers’ passion and love of sports. Pratt aims to design products to make sports more enjoyable. “Isn’t that what a lot of products are for,” Pratt asked, “making it easier and more convenient.”

Pushing forward
Pratt’s ideas are endless and like the Energizer bunny, he just keeps going and going. When asked what part of it all drives him the most, he said, “I always hear the word passion. Do I sound that way? I don’t mean to. I just really enjoy this.”
Pratt and the OGIO team have a lot of ideas cooking, and when the economy gets better, Pratt says the company is going to be in really good shape.
“Even in this economy, we’ve said the last place we’re going to cut is design, absolutely the last place,” he said. “We’ve thinned out everywhere we can, but we haven’t in design because we said we have to lead there. As people have struggled and cut the muscle out of their design, we said let’s be ready to attack.
“There are always these waves. There’s not a wave right now, but there will be another wave,” Pratt said. “We have to ride out the lull on our surfboard and wait for the next wave. When a wave comes, we will be ready.”
In the meantime, Pratt and the OGIO design team will work on some of the concepts sitting in Pratt’s idea file that’s 3 feet deep, and with the debut of each new product, OGIO distances itself further from that one hit wonder label.