The following interview was featured on Australian outdoor lifestyle site, and Ghost Outdoors stockist: Homecamp.
Beautifully designed, durably built and effortlessly cool, we bring you Ghost Outdoors. Ghost create modern, minimalist products that look good, feel good and encourage a life outdoors. We chat to the Ghost team about the inspiration for the brand, their philosophy and their dream places to hang their hammocks!
Who is Ghost Outdoors? Tell us about your brand and the Ghost philosophy.
We’re an Australian-designed outdoor apparel company making rugged, design-focussed camping and outdoor gear. We believe in escaping the entrapment of modern life at regular intervals, whether it be jumping in a car and taking off, or hiring an epic cabin with some mates somewhere, where your phone cuts out and nobody can find you for a weekend. We’re drawn to wild, unsurveiled environments where you can do a nudie run or skip a shower and it’s all good, you’re free to just be.
We sometimes describe ourselves as an “outdoor brand for indoor cats”, because during the week, we’re city-dwelling design-pervs but we wanted to make a collection of products that could serve a double duty; something you could take outside and trash but then roll into work on a Monday.
Ghost draws inspiration from the simplicity and quality of some of Australia’s longstanding heritage brands, what other factors come into play when designing new products? Tell us a little about the process involved in making your products.
Well, first step is we get together over a beer and think about what we want. What would be a useful product? What would help us escape more often, more easily? What would be a cool take on a utility product? What would be a utility take on a cool product? We laugh a lot. We make a lot of sketches and prototypes. Elizabeth, our lead designer is an architect so she’s used to working in this fluid, conceptual way.
We draw a lot of inspiration from the Australian landscape and attitude. We think about colour palette, technical fabrics and hardware through that lense. Where are we going with it? What’s going into it? Who’s using it? And we keep refining until we get something that looks tight and also, is tight :)
The biggest challenge is always producing products that meet our standards for quality and durability. We’ve learned it’s about finding passionate factories who “get us” and partnering with talented people that share our ambitions.
If you could hang your hammock in three dream spots in Australia, where would they be?
Anywhere remote. Ideally between two trees with a beer in hand, or strung up between two cars works a treat. If we had to pick one, it would be the edge of the desert at Gnaraloo Station where you can lay back, rest between surfs and watch the whales swim past.
You can find the full range of Ghost Outdoors gear at Homecamp.com.au along with a bunch of other rad stuff you probably need.
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