{"id":17015,"date":"2017-06-28T07:00:56","date_gmt":"2017-06-28T14:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/?p=17015"},"modified":"2024-07-15T10:56:01","modified_gmt":"2024-07-15T17:56:01","slug":"women-behind-the-gear-osprey-designer-cassie-tweed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/hike\/women-behind-the-gear-osprey-designer-cassie-tweed","title":{"rendered":"Women Behind the Gear: Osprey Designer Cassie Tweed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every morning, Cassie Tweed hops on her 1960 Honda Cub and merges onto the highway with hundreds of other motorbikes flowing \u201clike a school of fish\u201d through Ho Chi Minh City. When it rains, the Saigon River floods the streets to her knees.<\/p>\n

Cassie is the design director for Osprey. She lives and works in Vietnam, a long way from Southern California, where she grew up. \u201cThe outdoors was always very much a part of my life,\u201d she says. \u201cI was also into creating, building, making things.\u201d Osprey was her first job out of college, and seven years later, she\u2019s still living her dream.<\/p>\n

Osprey founder Mike Pfotenhauer was an early mentor. He never trained as a designer, so he had a unique approach that Cassie found refreshing. \u201cFrom my background with a design degree, we come from a creative world, but we also put structure around it,\u201d Cassie said. \u201cMike\u2019s a free spirit. It was really good to get that perspective on design.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three years ago, Mike decided to move the design center and he gave Cassie a choice: Colorado or Vietnam. \u201cI felt like going to Vietnam made the most sense,\u201d she said. Most designers visit factories for a week or two, but Cassie\u2019s office is in a traditional Vietnamese wooden house, just steps from the sample room where prototypes are made.<\/p>\n