Broken from the top down; weak leadership, declining brands, toxic culture, limited growth opportunities - Anonymous employee Cascade Designs, Inc. Employee Review

Cascade employees are a collection of passionate, outdoor-oriented individuals with a huge range of expertise from manufacturing to microbiology, mechanical engineering to marketing and sales. Between our multiple brands, product categories and diverse workforce we are far more complex than companies many times our size. This makes for a non-conventional approach to management. We could not maintain this breath of activity and market leadership with a conventional structure. After a few years of experimenting with different approaches we have opted for a broad-based top-level team. We are confident that our current management structure will help us continue to innovate and thrive over the long-term. But given the challenges of managing a complex structure, we readily acknowledge that getting to this stage has not been smooth for everyone. By and large, we believe our success stems from doing things outside of the typical manner. Rather than sourcing our products from Asia or selling out to a large parent company, we have remained as a private, family owned company, and kept our workforce and manufacturing here in the United States. We take great pride in this fact and believe it’s in the best interest of our workforce, products, brands and longevity of the company as a whole. As you point out, there are new, smaller and more nimble competitors entering the marketplace. What we are seeing is a maturation of the outdoor market as a whole. New entrants are able to make a big splash bringing new ideas to market that has seen many of the same brands year over year. This spurs us to push our bounds of innovations with new products like the MSR Guardian water purifier and Therm-a-Rest NeoAir and Speed Valve lines; products that have pressed the industry as a whole to new levels. We have been continually profitable since our founding and our brand caliber, position and quality is the continually among the best in the industry. Cascade prides itself on our low employee turnover, but suspect that for some, in a company of 500, we are not a good fit. We do indeed have flexible work hours where applicable and a casual dress code. In a company of our size, there may be some abuse. But overall, we feel that these policies help us attract and retain top talent. We can do a better job of communicating realistic expectations regarding Cascade’s culture and environment and ensure that employees that are unhappy in this environment are able to shift their position or move on in a timely manner. However, we need to avoid keeping people who are staying for the wrong reason. In regard to pay, admittedly, we have not benchmarked our salaries against market rates as often as may be necessary, but having recently done so, plan to continue benchmarking at regular intervals. That being said, we have not had trouble recruiting the highly qualified individuals we need. We also have mechanisms to go above market-rate for specific strategic hires. However, if a person stagnates in their position at Cascade then a change may be necessary to keep pace with their pay ambitions, which may mean moving on from Cascade. In response to your criticism about our owner, we are a privately owned company, which we view as an advantage over our competition. A passionate, engaged owner with whims and ideas is infinitely better than a purely financially interested parent company, equity investor or the stock market. Go ask some of our peers who have been taken over by a strategic investment firm. This fact has allowed us to remain faithful to our mission of creating the best outdoor gear in the industry and continually reinvest in the company rather than be beholden to profit and shareholders. Take for example our continued commitment to manufacture in the United States, a point that nearly every one of our competitors has ceded to overseas operations. While we can’t ensure that every new project will be a success, we will continue to try new segments and product lines. And occasionally these will create new markets for us, such as hollow fiber gravity water treatment. After all, experimentation and innovation help our continued growth and position within the industry. Thank you for your frank and honest feedback. I hope the above gives an alternative perspective on some of the points raised in your review.