From Idea to Successful Startup that Adventurers Truly Love

With Hofer Studio and Wolf and Grizzly

Before adventure tool company Wolf and Grizzly was Wolf and Grizzly, it was the spark of an idea: to simplify the complex equipment that makes camping more difficult than it needs to be. Here’s how we defined and fanned the flame into a roaring business offering products that customers really love by focusing on the right design principles and philosophy from the start.

Words by Jackelyn Gill

When things got chaotic in the office, George Rizkalla found peace in the great outdoors. During seven years as a software developer and product manager at BlackBerry, he would often drive to a quiet place in nature to simply enjoy his lunch and disconnect from the hustle at work. It was through those moments that he fell in love with adventure… but not all aspects of it, especially once he took it a step further and took his first camping trip.

“The tools were absolutely terrible,” he remembers. Tools that came in many pieces, rendering them complex to assemble and easy to lose. Tools that weren’t durable, requiring costly replacement after just a few uses. Tools that were cumbersome, difficult to pack, or too heavy to comfortably carry. Tools that were too often discarded, littering campsites for future visitors and damaging the environment. 

As much as using those tools frustrated George, though, it sparked within him an idea. “As someone who really struggled with the tools that are required for camping, I had a greater appreciation for the challenges that are associated with it. I wanted to enable those adventures for others and reduce their obstacles as well,” he says. 

That was the idea George brought to me over a cup of coffee at a local Kitchener-Waterloo café. Having never started a company before, he wasn’t sure about his next steps. He didn’t just need help building a product. He needed help defining his “why” as much as his “what.” 

That was in 2016, and since then, we’ve worked together to fan that spark of an idea into a fully-fledged wilderness brand built on a philosophy of adventure, sustainability, and robust yet beautiful designs that last a lifetime—and a series of award-winning products that consumers truly love.

Creating a brand from an idea

 There’s a reason why Wolf and Grizzly’s customers say things like, “My support for you and your team will be endless! Honestly, my mate and I talked for a good three hours just about the grill, went to bed and got up to cook breakfast—and kept talking about how happy we are with it!” and, “When you are three days away from civilization, you need stuff that you can depend on. This grill works, is worth the money, and you can depend on it. … It outperforms any grill that I have ever used in 40 years of backwoods camping and tripping, and not just by a little bit.” Everything George and his team create ties back into a core design philosophy that fully represents their brand, serves their business’ goals, and resonates with their fans.

That is no accident, and it didn’t happen overnight. That coffee meeting between myself and George was the first of many, where we began walking through my five-stage design framework.  Before diving into a product, we needed to align on the work ahead of us, starting with the problem we were solving and why. “I remember the question of, ‘why Wolf and Grizzly?’ I remember a lot of questions around what adventure means to me, what these experiences mean to me, what type of experiences I want to pass to other people,” says George. From there, we identified the values that mattered most, which gave us the direction and confidence we needed to move forward. “Those questions became the foundation of what Wolf and Grizzly is, of its design ethos and also of its brand.”

 We paired that exploration with market validation, assembling an expert panel of outdoor enthusiasts and adventure-seekers who had used different kinds of wilderness tools, from grills to tents. After all, you can certainly ask people what they want, but it’s far better to observe their biggest challenges—and the way people approach them—in action.

 Through a series of surveys, we continued to dig deeper, learning that they struggled with equipment size, weight, and shape. They needed tools that were simple and quick to assemble and disassemble, with a minimal number of parts, that were easy to clean and maintain, and that could be easily packed away in a backpack or bag.

 It’s one thing to have an idea; it’s another to have an idea that truly resonates with others. It was clear we had accomplished the latter. “Asking honest questions, recording genuine answers—raw, with all of the mess that comes with it—is so incredibly powerful,” says George.

Taking a measured, research-oriented approach meant we didn’t have to make any guesses about the market. And it gave us both the confidence to move forward to the next step: thinking about a product.

Creating a product from a brand

The Grill made sense as Wolf and Grizzly’s first product. It fit with their philosophy of sustainability for profit, people, and planet. It met their goal of longevity as “The only grill you’ll ever need,” as the kind of item that can be passed onto others. It focused on a core element of the camping experience. It solved a problem that many people encounter. It was complex enough to be innovative, but not so complex that it couldn’t be tackled by an early-stage business.

But it wasn’t our first idea. It wasn’t even one of our first 30 ideas, which we collected after assembling a team of three junior designers and challenging them to brainstorm ten ideas each. I was excited to oversee this effort, and George was inspired by the ideas that resulted from it.

“There was a wide gamut of ideas,” he remembers. “It was an incredibly useful exercise because it surfaced ideas we hadn’t really thought about.”

From those 30 ideas, we selected ten and asked our expert adventurers to rank them based on sketches, concepts, and descriptions. In that batch: a rotisserie. It wasn’t the top-ranked idea, but it emerged as a strong candidate, especially when combined with our competitive analysis and market research. We also realized that, while a rotisserie would be a niche product, a grill would be a similar product with a similar purpose, yet would solve a wider problem.

It was time to get hands-on. We built and tested some prototypes ourselves, even grilling hot dogs in our backyards. We pitted them against competitor grills, observing how new users understood the parts and put them together, a process that often took 15 minutes or more. That supported our criteria of creating a product with just two parts, which could be assembled in seconds.

We also began approaching manufacturers that would meet the sustainability and quality goals of the brand while still delivering on-time. “Sustainability as a pillar has always been present. We wanted to make sure that we were sustainably building the product, not only from a materials perspective but also from a process perspective,” says George. “That includes environmental and working conditions for the entire team that will be working on the product perspective as well.”

Creating a future from a foundation

The Grill originally launched with a Kickstarter campaign in 2017, and it saw immediate and overwhelming success with over $78,000 raised . That’s 225 per cent of their initial goal.

Customers flocked to the product’s simplicity and durability—and continue to do so. Set-up is simple: just expand a collapsible 304 Stainless Steel frame and unroll the cooking surface, inspired by bamboo sushi rolling mats, and lock both into place. Put together, the components support about 16 kg (roughly the weight of 320 hot dogs) and handily withstand the intensity of a fire while developing a beautiful patina over time. When not in use, everything packs neatly into a zippered bag smaller in diameter than a water bottle. At just about 1 kg, the grill system is perfectly suited for both backyard and backcountry.

We trialled different manufacturers before landing on a partner overseas, a decision that took us to China for a few weeks to tour factories, oversee the manufacturing process and finalize production to ensure quality. Customers were thrilled with the results, with users telling us that, “Everything from the packaging, to the feel and finish, the ease of setup is perfect to the last detail … the passion you have for this project is clear and I wish you all the success possible."

In fact, the Grill campaign was so successful that I worked with George and his growing team to create a companion product as a stretch goal. The Fire Set portably nests a steel striker and a ferrocerium rod to easily start fires—no matter the weather conditions—in a more sustainable way than matches or lighters. 

As we continued to collect new user insights, make improvements to the grill, complete a supply chain audit, and refine product portfolio strategy, we also started work on Wolf and Grizzly’s next product: Fire Safe. Carefully designed as a companion piece to the Grill, the Fire Safe is a portable fire pit that fits underneath the grill’s frame and cooktop, and safely contains the fuel used for cooking. It, too, packs down into a compact 1” in height and weighs less than 1 kg. And the FireSafe Kickstarter was another resounding success, raising almost $250,000—or 1,242 per cent of their goal. Combined with the funding from angel investors and venture capitalists secured after the success of the Grill, George and his team had secured almost $1 million for the project.

The Fire Safe was more than a new product, though. Through it, my role evolved from hands-on design into an advisory role with the business, as George brought on a contract designer to help with execution, who took our concept and brought it to market. Our team expanded from Kitchener-Waterloo to a distributed, worldwide team across Canada, the U.K and China making high-quality physical products. 

Together, all three products formed a simple, compact, and fully integrated system that tackled different aspects of the same problem. Most importantly, customers loved our approach to creating equipment that focused on repairing, not replacing, and that they could rely on for years to come through thoughtful design and engineering. “It was just kudos across the board from design to execution. People had written on multiple occasions that this was, by far, the best Kickstarter that they had ever backed,” George remembers.

In the first two years alone, Wolf and Grizzly won the hearts of more than 20,000 adventurers, but it wasn’t just customers who loved the products. The Grill design completed and won a European Product Design Award, the RANGE Radical by Design Award, and an Outdoor Retailer Product of the Year Award. It was featured everywhere from Toque Magazine and Canoe to Digital Trends and GQ.  The Fire Safe completed and won a Good Design Award in Chicago, and as a combined set with the grill, a Good Design Award in Japan.

A little while ago, I helped George select and onboard a full-time design lead of their own, and I continue to advise and coach the team through new projects like their latest product, the Cook Set. It, too, continues the design philosophy we set in the earliest days, along with their well-loved approach to problem-solving and dedication to their customers. And it, too, was red-hot on Kickstarter, where it raised $350,000, or 875 per cent of their goal.

But the Wolf and Grizzly story isn’t over yet. Today, Wolf and Grizzly products are available on-the-shelf at large adventure retailers like Mountain Equipment Co-op, REI Co-op and online at Huckberry, with distributors in Japan, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the strong design roots we set at the beginning of our journey helped George and his team redefine adventure for customers who were forced indoors and increase sales for the company by 154 per cent. To me, this is a testament to the great philosophy we built around product and customer experience; that the Grill, Fire Set and Fire Safe are truly forward-thinking, universal, and relevant, even in the most challenging times. Today, W&G continues to grow as the lead outdoor product brand under Nolk.

And as much as I’ve learned through the process of working with Wolf and Grizzly—George’s MBA-centric approach is a perfect complement to my design-centric approach—I like to think George has equally learned from my help, too. “Working with Joseph over the last few years has been like going to design school,” he says. “It's been about learning a new language, it's about learning consistency, it's about learning the invisible aspects that lead to a good product.”

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