Shibumi shade trial#
Shibumi shade professional#

Some of their best business advice, Alex says, came from a friend who told them to fail fast. Early on, Slater says, he and Dane were able to participate in an MBA course at UNC then called Launching the Venture, a 3-part course on turning ideas into start-ups. None of the three studied design or engineering at UNC, but they did study business, communication, math, and accounting, essential skills when starting a business. The trio plunged into filling orders for the Shibumi Shade, learning on the fly. Shibumi Shade at Cape Lookout Hobby Becomes A Business “The experience of sitting under a Shibumi Shade is unique because of the arch shape, the canopy flowing in the breeze, and the expansive shaded area that allows an entire group to sit together, comfortably shaded.” “We think we’ve been able to revolutionize the beach experience for thousands of beach goers whether they’re older adults who aren’t able to wrangle heavy tents or umbrellas, or young families that already have too many items to carry to the beach and not enough time to relax, or boaters who want to bring shade to the sandbar, or any one who wants ‘setting up the shade’ to be the least of their worries on the beach,” Slater says. Six adults can sit side by side under the canopy, with extra room for beach gear, dogs and kids. Once constructed, the Shibumi provides over 100 square feet of shade that’s rated with 30+ UPF sun protection, blocking 97% of the sun’s harmful UV rays. The carry sack is filled with sand providing an anchor that keeps the Shibumi in place. Assembly is intuitive the entire structure can be put up or taken down in about two minutes, and is easy to relocate. The Shibumi Shade is extremely light, packing down into a carry sack that weighs less than four pounds. When Shibumi is flying, like a flag, it marks a spot and a moment in time, sheltering friends and families who are nesting under it.” There is something profoundly sophisticated for a product to celebrate something that speaks to the nature and spirit of a place in which it exists. “Shibumi Shade honors the wind, an element that is inherent to the experience of the beach, instead of fighting it. Dane Barnes says his friend Van Nolintha, owner of Brewery Bhavana and Bida Manda in downtown Raleigh, describes it best: The design of the Shibumi Shade is unique, an arched pole that holds a panel made of ripstop parachute material that floats on the wind.

This year, Shibumi Shades are sold in 20 retail stores in North and South Carolina as well as Florida and have made an appearance at over 200 beaches from Emerald Isle to Santa Monica and from Cape Cod to Oahu. The story has been the same every year since, though they now use a larger cut and sew facility in Asheboro. They again made as many as they could, but again sold out.

Shibumi shade professional#

In 2017, the team transitioned to having a professional cut and sew facility in Raleigh sew the Shibumi Shade. “Shibumi is also a small apartment complex in Chapel Hill, where Dane, Alex, and I all lived in college, so it’s a common thread between us.” “Shibumi is a Japanese design concept that means the elegance of simplicity, which we think fits the Shibumi Shade well,” Scott Barnes explains. The name they chose for their product was the Shibumi Shade. They hadn’t planned on selling any but a lot of families at the beach asked where they could get one, so they decided to sew and sell a few dozen that summer, sewing everything on nights and weekends. The friends took it down to Emerald Isle for trials and soon had a lot of orders for their invention. The summer of 2016 saw the completion of the first Shade prototype, produced in a spare bedroom. This got us off the ground at first, but we quickly realized this was too big of an ‘ask,’ and in order to pour hours of development time into sewing concepts, ultimately we took on the sewing ourselves.” At first, we asked a friend to sew a canopy for us because she had the knowledge and a sewing machine handy. “Learning to sew allowed us to innovate more quickly. “One of the biggest new skills we had to learn was sewing,” Slater says. The next step in the design took the friends well outside the skill set usually learned by young male North Carolinians. This required us to challenge our own preconceptions about what we thought would work, and to actually go out and prove the concept.” “Getting something in the sand so that we could test and learn about it was more important than looking for the perfect solution - at a stage when we didn’t know what the ‘perfect solution’ looked like yet. “We improvised the very first prototype with a simple set of PVC conduit pipe,” Slater says.

Shibumi shade trial#

Designing a prototype involved lots of trial and error.