Design Matters
Design Matters
Something so simple - a kite. How hard can it be?
Sticks and string and newspaper. Plastic bags and bike spokes. We all built kites as kids and sometimes they even flew. If we ran fast enough.
Turns out there’s a lot more to kites. Call us obsessed, but over 25 years we’ve studied spars and standoffs, bridle geometries and sail tension, tinkered with weight and balance, hung out in wind tunnels. Flew in no wind, low wind, and honkin gales. Broke a lot of string. Figured out a few things.
The Zero-G is a magical tensegrity structure that ascends like a kite and then glides like an airplane. It’s so light you can fly it indoors in no wind at all.
Now, we’re the folks who understand the dynamics of tethered wings better than anyone in the business. From the camber of an airfoil to the texture of the line in your hand, we meld modern technology with an ancient art to design amazing kites that look as good as they fly.
Colorful patterns we’ve created using fractal mathematics are dye-sublimated into some of our fabrics.
Molded connector fittings need to be strong but light. CAD models and 3D printing have revolutionized how we can design molded parts.
Look up close and from far away. You’ll see purposeful design in our kites at every scale.
We tell ourselves it’s all for you. So you can fly with style. So you can live the way you fly in dreams. Racing fast. Floating high. Flitting about on the breeze…Maybe we’re just a little obsessed.
Fussing with bridles the old fashioned way. For the umpteenth time.
Sometimes all the fancy software and computations don’t tell you much, and you need to get outside and start messing around. Feeling the kite carve the air, checking its balance on the wind, plowing it headfirst into rocks time after time. Heck, we even film crashes with high speed cameras just to see how stuff breaks.
The 4-D comes in a padded zipper case to travel the world.
The Zenith 5 lives in a colorful lightweight sleeve with an integrated holder for your flying line.
We design and build custom tools and fixtures to ensure quality through all the production steps.
Building kites right means understanding every detail about how to make them. Over the years we’ve reinvented kite manufacturing by designing specialized tools, machines, and production methods for our production floors. So you get kites you can count on, designed by folks who get their kicks from making amazing design fly.