As far back as I can remember.....I left school in 1984 to start an apprenticeship with a factory in Crawley, West Sussex. At the end of the first year I went on this company sponsored outward bound course. We did all the usual activities; rock climbing, swimming, orienteering, sailing and of course kayaking. Since I’d never really been away from home I was terrified of the thought of being on this course with all these other guys who all seemed to be much more sure of themselves than I was at that time. I really enjoyed the experience and came away with a strong desire to get into kayaking but no idea how to get started. Books from the library were dated and gave no real clues. It was an idea that I simply “shelved” through lack of any information! During the 80’s I developed a taste for music (Gary Numan, Japan, Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy, The Alarm, The Cult, The Cure, Flesh for Lulu, Balaam & the Angel, Alien Sex Fiend and ObJayDa and later Muse and Placebo being amongst my favourites) and I spent a lot of time pretty much on my own with only my walkman and an extensive collection of music cassettes for company. Toward the end of the 80’s I started a “band” with a guy that I worked with. He had loads of electronic keyboards, a drum machine and a computer and I had a head full of wild ideas about fame and fortune. During this period my friend and I, with our girlfriends, would frequently go to Bognor Regis where his gran lived (very rock ‘n’ roll) and by coincidence he had an old fibreglass canoe. We would paddle along the beach avoiding the wave breakers, concrete groins, decapitated fish, used condoms and sanitary towels (a sort of sewage slalom). A few times we experimented with an eskimo roll but we really had no idea what we were doing so every attempt ended in failure. It wasn’t really what I was looking for but it was fun and I look back on those years, when I had very little money but such high hopes and wonder if I could have ever predicted where I am today. During the early 90’s dreams of musical success had faded. My musical “partner in crime” had moved away and I was trying to write comic books and other short stories (much inspired by Frank Miller: Sin City, Legends of the Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Returns) in my spare time while holding down a day job that held little interest to me. I just could not see myself working in a factory until I was old and grey! I tried my hand at painting but none of my creative ventures showed any signs of going anywhere. My girlfriend and I ended up in a studio flat worth half what we’d paid for it (it dropped from £60,000 to £30,000 before we knew what was going on because of a house price crash that left many people like us in “negative equity”). I was broke, hated my job and stuck in a one room flat. The situation put a lot of strain on my relationship with my girlfriend and, though many around us separated, we got married and together found the strength to keep going until we could afford to move on. We spent 5 years in the tiny flat with no idea how to change our circumstances but we simply put our head down and kept going. Somewhere during this period I saw a magazine with a feature on extreme kayaker Shaun Baker and was immediately inspired. I thought “so that’s kayaking”?! Throwing yourself in a tiny Eskimo Topo off of a waterfall was a far cry from paddling up and down the beach at Bognor and I wasn’t sure that I’d ever want to take things that far but it opened my eyes to the scope and the possibilities available if only I knew how to get started. Eventually my wife and I were able to move from our flat to a small house with three bedrooms. It wasn’t long before my wife started to think of having children and I one day joked that if she bought me a canoe I would do my part on the “baby making front”. ;-) It was the mid 90’s, the internet was starting to take off and through a change in my job I had gained access to the internet. I scraped together just enough money to buy one of the cheapest kayaks on the market and at last I was off. Within a year I had discovered a local canoe club and I felt like I was on a roll. I was hooked up to the internet, I was paddling my little blue Perception Reflex and I had discovered a club full of people like me. I was too old to seriously consider competing and my wife had developed the bump that would soon become our fist child, my son Corey. Nevertheless I became more and more involved in the club and the sport. I loved everything about it and, since I had mentioned that I was playing around with the internet, was asked to develop a web-site for the club. I realised that a club web-site would never be what I wanted to do and so I developed a site that I affectionately titled “CAKE – the Canoe And Kayak Emporium” (you have no idea how long I spend trying to come up with that one)! The site was never intended to be a big, commercial venture. It was just a bit of fun! Now we’re talking about the late 90’s, digital camera’s were expensive, broadband wasn’t around but the internet was growing at an amazing rate and in doing so was making it easy to contact people on the other side of the World. Through their websites I e-mailed every kayak manufacturer with requests for pictures and information with which to develop my site and received few replies except from one guy from a little company in Canada by the name of Riot. Of course I’d heard of Corran Addison, his ramblings in magazines, wild ideas and wild designs so when I received a reply from him my first assumption was that it was someone else writing on behalf of him. Corran’s reply to me was succinct and generous and went something like: “Great to hear from you, take anything you want from the Riot site and, by the way, here’s another site that I have a connection with that you might like get information and pictures from”. I wrote back saying “Thanks to you and your company, if you really are Corran Addison” to which the reply came back (something like) “Sure it’s me, who the hell did you think it was”??? So started a long relationship with a guy that I have come to know as a generous man and a good friend. If ever you ask Corran for something and he can deliver he will. Corran would frequently provide images and text for articles that I was writing for my website or for magazines and never asked once “what ‘s in it for me”. I am not suggesting that he was acting selflessly, for sure my work was helping to support the legend that was/is Corran Addison but you would be amazed how many others are quick to put conditions upon their support to you or to promise something and then fail to deliver. At this time I got chatting to Grant Scamell, the man behind Kent Canoe Services, and he offered me a part time job at his shop (alongside my real job). It was there that I first me up with Glenn Burgess, the co-founder of High ‘n’ Mighty Distribution. It was a great time. We got to spend our weekends seeing, touching and usually selling all the latest boats. And we sometimes got to paddle them too. I had developed a taste for Eskimo kayaks, inspired I guess by the images and movies of Shaun Baker. I came into contact with several of the guys from the Eskimo Pro-Team as well as Jan Kellner (the creative expert behind the company). Though I was paddling Eskimo I appreciated Corran’s work and several of his designs appealed to me. It was not however until Arnd Schaeftlein, a member of the Eskimo Pro-Team, defected to Riot with his prototype Tekno that I became certain I would paddle a Riot kayak. While I believe that the Disco was Riot’s biggest seller, the Tekno was for me the most inspirational kayak they ever produced but I was somewhat dismayed that they appeared to “dumb down” the boat from all of the prototypes that I’d seen in the months leading up to the boats release. It was obvious that Eskimo wouldn’t put the Tekno into production. The blow moulding process relies on very complicated moulds that are expensive to produce. This prohibits them from producing kayaks that fail to appeal to the wider market. That I knew but I thought that Riot was the company that would “develop all the gear and toys that nobody else would”. I met up with Corran while he was touring Europe promoting the release of Air-Force One. We had a great time in Munich with Sebastian Gruendler and Ulrich and Gabbi Kittelburger from the Eskimo pro-team. Corran was just as I’d imagined him from all the e-mails, telephone calls, and all the video’s I’d seen. He is this tiny guy with the energy and enthusiasm of three men. As the conversation switches from kayaking to World politics to sex and back to kayaking (surely his favourite three subjects) he shows no sign of tiring. Even when it is past 2 am and all agree that it is time to hit the sack he clearly has the energy to keep talking and talking. He is like Muhammad Ali, an entertainer, bigger than life, love him or hate him but you cannot ignore him. It was clear to me during that meeting in March 2003 that all was not well between Corran and Riot. He refrained from commenting on several issues but when he did speak it was clear that he was not happy about so many things, resentful, dare I even say bitter! After that time I had several discussions with Corran and it was clear that the relationship between Corran and Jeff Rivest (according to Corran the “money man” at Riot) was deteriorating. So many times Corran could not, or would not, comment on things that he once would have. I became frustrated by what I was hearing. There are always (at least) two sides to these situations, two faces to the coin, but when all is said and done there can only be one winner and as I saw it Corran lost the company that he’d worked so hard for so long to build. I cannot comment on who was right and wrong but I can say that I saw the pain that Corran went through. You cannot fake that kind of torment! So in early 2004 Corran and Riot split and he was very protective regarding his plans for the future but it was clear that he was working on something. Then he mentioned that he would be unveiling some new toys at an “expression session” at Hawaii Sur Rhone, near Lyon, in France. I was intrigued. I wanted to know more but he was playing his cards close to his chest. Then I saw the new DragoRossi boats. I was determined to be the first guy in the UK to have one. They looked like nothing else, actually they looked like the boats that I’d wanted Corran to do for some years. Maybe not perfect but something totally new, totally different! Corran mentioned that he needed to find a UK distributor and I offered several options based on what I knew of credible existing UK importers / distributors. Glenn and I met up at meeting at annual BCU (British Canoe Union) London & South East event at Holme Pierrepoint, Nottingham. We started the usual old discussions about one day having a shop and I came up with the idea that we’d never be able to afford to buy an existing shop and competition in the market was already fierce. I suggested that we might be able to get a distribution business of the ground commencing with a few DVD’s from Corran. Glenn thought it was an interesting idea so we contacted Corran and after a few discussions about the finer details he dropped his exisitng distributor for us. Our plan was simple, we’d excite dealers by offering a free player with bulk DVD orders. Within months we would have a rapidly growing network of dealers even if we only had four or five titles to promote. Then, before we really new what was going on we fell into the deal with Eurotank and found ourselves the UK importers for DragoRossi kayaks too. The months we spent launching the company are now a blurred memory. Everything seemed to happen so fast, almost out of control. E-mails would fly between myself, Glenn, Corran and Diego almost every day and I’m not sure that I really believed it would all come together but it did and I am proud of what we have achieved so far. Glenn and I spent an evening bouncing names around. We tried various combinations of domain names and eventually settled on High ‘n’ Mighty because it had all the right ingredients. A name that, like System X, wasn’t tied directly to canoeing or kayaking. It summed up what we dreamed of. Going BIG and being STRONG! The logo came much later, actually it was during a trip to the UK Freestyle Team selection event. A result of sketches thrown together on the back of old envelopes with Glenn’s wife, Angela, and an old Flesh for Lulu album cover as the real inspiration. We’d barely launched DragoRossi and my friend Sebastian Gruendler and I were talking about the fortunes of Eskimo. Rikutek (the company that moulded the hulls) had bought the company from the Schnappinger family, they had put Jan Kellner in charge of production and he was apparently looking for a new UK distributor. I told “Sebbi” that I would be interested in Eskimo but was concerned about conflicts of interest and what Corran and Diego might think. Sebbi also mentioned Kober & Moll paddles. Now it was clear to me that there could be no conflict of interest between the paddles and the kayaks so I was hungry for that business and I made my intentions clear. I don’t know if Jan genuinely remembered me from the days when I paddled Eskimo. Among other things I had oredered him to put a drain bung in the Nano (after my frustration at having to drill one in my Zwo). I had suggested the name Xeno for one of his kayaks (derived from the Greek word for “different”) and on other occasions I had pestered him with my opinions about what Eskimo should do to be number one! Jan anounced that he would be coming to the UK to meet with the prospective importers, show them a few samples of the new products and wrap things up with System X. I decided to invite Jan to my house and there Glenn and I met with him and his young son (who was more interested in his GameBoy than our business talk). I cannot be sure but I think that the pizza followed by chocolate cake sealed the deal! All the time discussions with Kober/Moll seemed to drag on and not go anywhere until at the 2005 UK Outdoor Show we had an amazing surprise. Jan turned up with a roof rack full of new Eskimo Boats, Corran and Diego turned up with two brand new designs from DragoRossi and the guys from Kober & Moll agreed that we would be their UK distributor. Six months of intense work had delivered the foundations of our business. Now it is up to myself and Glenn to consolidate, to develop our ranges and grow the business. Our goal is simple. Always the best products, the best prices and the best service. I would say that starting a business is a bit like getting married. As your relationship develops you learn about your partner, their strengths, their weaknesses and their personality. I have learned so much about being in business but I know that there is so much I have to learn. I am doing something that was once nothing more than a pipe dream. I am proud of what Glenn and I have achieved and I am eager to see what we can do in the future. My moto: What's the point of winning the race if you don't enjoy racing? ;-) |
I don't have many pictures of myself
I will post more images soon! ;-) |
