// Est. 2016, Calgary AB
We started as a repair bench, not a brand.
Before Switchback Supply sold a single tent, we fixed other people's. Hundreds of them. Blown zippers, delaminated flys, hipbelts chewed by marmots with opinions. The repair notebook told us exactly what fails in the mountains and why.
So when we finally built our own gear, the design brief was already written: honest weights, tested ratings, and nothing we couldn't fix on the bench where it was born.
// What we believe
Three rules, no exceptions
01
Repair beats replace
A patched fly and a re-webbed hipbelt carry stories. Landfills carry regrets. Lifetime repairs are free because the alternative offends us.
02
Honest numbers
Trail weights come off the bench scale, temperature ratings off cold shoulders, boil times off a stopwatch at 1,045 m elevation. No asterisks.
03
Fewer, better
Every product must displace something weaker to earn a slot. If we wouldn't carry it up Ha Ling on a bad-weather day, we don't sell it.
// The switchbacks so far
Ten years, five turns
-
2016
The garage in Bridgeland
Mara Holt, a burnt-out wilderness guide, and Callum Reid, an engineer who weighed his lunch, start repairing friends' packs in a Calgary garage, and keep a notebook of everything that breaks.
-
2018
The repair bench goes official
The notebook becomes a rule: anything we sell, we fix for life. The bench moves to a real workshop on Bow Valley Trail with a till at the front, almost as an afterthought.
-
2021
The tester cohort
Forty volunteers (guides, tree planters, weekend scramblers) start beating on prototypes for a full season before anything ships. Two products fail the season and never launch.
-
2024
The Traverse 55
Four torso prototypes and one grumpy physiotherapist later, our flagship pack ships. It's still the thing we're proudest of, and still the thing we repair least.
-
2026
Today
Fourteen products. Not fifty, not a marketplace. Fourteen pieces we can stand behind, weigh honestly, and fix on the bench where they were born.
// The bench crew
Four people, one scale, one sewing machine
The same crew designs it, weighs it, sells it and fixes it. Email us and one of these four reads it.
-
Mara Holt
Co-founder, product & testing
A former wilderness guide who runs the tester cohort and signs off on every temperature rating.
- Home trail
- Skoki Loop
- Never leaves without
- Stormline 3L Shell
-
Callum Reid
Co-founder, engineering
Weighs everything twice, lunch included. He owns the bench scale and every spec table on this site.
- Home trail
- Ha Ling Peak
- Never leaves without
- Meridian Carbon Poles
-
Inés Varga
Repair bench lead
Has rebuilt more than two thousand zippers and can match a patch fabric by feel.
- Home trail
- Burstall Pass
- Never leaves without
- Contour Sleep Pad
-
Wren Albright
Customer crew
Answers your emails within one business day and keeps the gear finder's packing lists honest.
- Home trail
- Nose Hill loops
- Never leaves without
- Prism 750 Insulated Bottle
// The Switchback guarantee
Broken? Send it home.
Every Switchback product carries a lifetime repair promise: if it breaks (trail accident, gear-room mishap, marmot), we fix it at our Calgary bench, free, for as long as the product exists. If we genuinely can't fix it, we replace it and keep the corpse for research.
New gear also gets a 60-day trail test: use it on real trips for two months, and if it hasn't earned its place, send it back for a full refund.
- Repairs completed
- 6,400+
- Median turnaround
- 9 days
- Repair cost to you
- $0
- Products, total
- 14
Come meet the fourteen
Every piece in the range survived a season with the tester cohort before it earned a product page. Browse them all, or let the gear finder pick your kit.