Early Winters
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Early Winters, Ltd. of Seattle, Washington, USA was the first company to create and sell a consumer product made of Gore-Tex laminates made by W.L. Gore & Associates in Elkton, Maryland. The product was a streamlined, two-person tent called The Light Dimension. This first Gore-Tex product debuted in 1976. The Gore salesman who introduced Early Winters to the fabric product (which at that time was still without a name) was Joe Tanner, whose role is now largely forgotten even at W.L. Gore & Associates. Tanner had made the rounds and had been turned down by companies such as REI, Eddie Bauer, and The North Face.
Early Winters was founded in 1972 by William S. Nicolai who created a tent called the Omnipotent. The Light Dimension was created by Nicolai and William H. Edwards and was marketed by Ron Zimmerman. Initially the general public had difficulty understanding how a fabric could be both waterproof yet breathable to water vapor. Zimmerman found that a four-inch square of the fabric could be held by a rubber band over boiling water placed in a coffee cup. This allowed visible steam to pass through the Gore-Tex fabric. When the cup was turned over, no water came through. This consumer demonstration became known at the Gore Company as the "Z Square."
Early Winters approached $20 million (USD) in annual sales, mostly through innovative catalogs, before being sold to the Orvis company in 1984. It was later purchased by the Norm Thompson group in Portland, Oregon. In 2004 Norm Thompson renamed the company Sahalie.
