Inside the Gear Reveal That's Got the Trekking World Talking
Every year, the outdoor industry generates billions of dollars in revenue selling variations on the same ideas — slightly lighter carbon fiber, marginally stiffer frames, incrementally improved waterproofing. Genuine mechanical innovation, the kind that starts from a biomechanical blank page and arrives somewhere entirely new, is genuinely rare. That's what made the debut of two patent-pending designs from FloWorks Design, Inc. — the FlōPole trekking pole and the FlōFoot — at the KORE Outdoors Summit such a notable moment for gear professionals and backcountry enthusiasts alike.
The unveiling took place on September 17 at the KORE Outdoors Summit, held in Kimberley, B.C., home of the fifth annual KORE Outdoors Summit. The timing wasn't accidental. The KORE Outdoors Summit is Canada's only conference dedicated to outdoor gear and the manufacturing and product design sector that creates it, making it one of the few stages in North America where a small design shop with a genuinely original idea can command the full attention of engineers, retailers, athletes, and investors in a single room.
What Is KORE — And Why Does It Matter to American Gear Enthusiasts?
Most American outdoor consumers have never heard of Kimberley, British Columbia. They should pay attention. Some of the most interesting things happening in the outdoor industry aren't coming from corporate headquarters — they're coming from small mountain towns like Kimberley, B.C. The KORE Outdoors Summit, run by the Kootenay Outdoor Recreation Enterprise, has quietly become one of the most important idea-incubating events on the continent for anyone serious about where outdoor gear is actually going.
KORE, which stands for Kootenay Outdoor Recreation Enterprise, is a non-profit dedicated to growing the outdoor gear industry in the region. But calling it regional undersells what it has become. "What began as a grassroots gathering of people who believed the Kootenays could play a bigger role in the outdoor gear economy has grown into a must-attend event for makers, designers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders from across Canada, the United States, and beyond," said KORE board chair Matt Mosteller.
The two-day gathering brings together company founders, gear designers, engineers, athletes and other industry leaders to share ideas on everything from product development and manufacturing to sustainability and entrepreneurship. It's less trade show, more working summit — the kind of environment where a new grip geometry gets serious scrutiny from the people best equipped to evaluate it. "The Summit sells out every year because people leave with real connections, new partnerships, fresh ideas, and opportunities they wouldn't find anywhere else," Mosteller added.
A Growing Hub for Serious Outdoor Innovation
KORE is an alliance of outdoor gear and apparel manufacturers, designers, and entrepreneurs based in the Kootenays, with more than 80 craft gear makers who have organically launched production in the region. That density of makers in a single mountain corridor — all competing, collaborating, and pressure-testing each other's work — creates the kind of fertile ground where something like the FlōPole can move from concept to credible prototype. KORE is also helping drive investment, foster innovation, and strengthen the unique cultural and economic landscape of the Kootenays.
The keynote presentation at this year's KORE Outdoors Summit featured Mountain Equipment Company's Chief Merchandising Officer Chris Speyer, who discussed the state of outdoor retail and MEC's progress since its return to majority Canadian ownership in 2025. Alongside that macro-level industry conversation, attendees could choose from concurrent workshops on topics ranging from wearable sensors in technical fabric to community gear libraries to what the growth of adaptive mountain biking means for the cycling industry. In that context — surrounded by designers thinking laterally about how bodies interact with gear — the FlōPole reveal landed with particular force.
The FlōPole: Rethinking a Tool That Hasn't Really Changed
The trekking pole, in its current dominant form, has been largely the same device for decades. A grip, a strap, a shaft, a tip. The ergonomics have been tweaked. Materials have improved dramatically. But the fundamental mechanical relationship between a hiker's wrist and the pole — the geometry under which force is applied and absorbed — has gone essentially unchallenged. FloWorks Design, Inc. is challenging it directly.
FloWorks Design, Inc. builds the FlōPole trekking pole with a strap-driven grip that keeps the wrist neutral and drives force straight down the pole centerline. That single design principle — deceptively simple in description, radical in its departure from convention — addresses something that serious long-distance hikers and fastpackers know well: that by the end of a big day on steep terrain, the wrists pay the price.
The Biomechanics Behind the Problem
To understand why the FlōPole matters, you have to understand what conventional poles actually do to a wrist under load. Every pole plant exerts tremendous forces on the wrist, and with conventional poles, those forces do not travel straight through the centerline of the pole — they travel through the wrist itself. On a flat trail, that's a manageable annoyance. On a long scree descent or a sustained technical ridge walk, it becomes a genuine injury risk.
Standard poles require the hand to grip the handle tightly, which means the muscles and tendons of the forearm are working continuously to stabilize a joint that is bent, not neutral. With conventional poles, grip fatigue builds fast because the hand must grip tightly — comfort drops off after a few hours, and wrist strain and injury risk are much higher due to repeated stress on tendons.
The FlōPole inverts this relationship. The design keeps the wrist position neutral under load, drives force transmission along the centerline, and reduces wrist fatigue over long days. Instead of the hand doing the structural work, the hand rests while the strap does the work — grip fatigue is minimal, comfort holds steady mile after mile, and the joint stays in a neutral position with lower injury potential.
Shock Absorption as a Secondary Benefit
One of the less-discussed advantages of the FlōPole system is what it does for shock transmission on hard ground. Traditional pole-to-wrist impact on rocky descents is absorbed entirely by the joint, because the hand and wrist are the mechanical intermediaries between tip and arm. The FlōPole's strap-and-holder architecture changes that path. An elastic strap and strap holder that flexes takes care of shocks — something impossible with conventional poles where impact travels straight through a bent wrist.
This is the kind of design detail that sounds minor in a product description but matters enormously after eight hours on the trail. Anyone who has descended a serious mountain with conventional poles and arrived at the trailhead with aching wrists will immediately understand what FloWorks is solving.
Shaft Options and Sizing Flexibility
The FlōPole isn't a concept product — it's a fully developed system with real-world sizing and material options built in. The grip system uses a centerline load-bearing strap with strap sizing in small, medium, and large available via tool-free swap, with shaft options in carbon, folding carbon, and 7075 alloy. The tool-free strap swap is worth noting: it means a single set of poles can be properly fitted for different users without carrying any hardware, which matters for guides, gear-sharing households, and anyone who has suffered with an improperly sized wrist strap over a long route.
The FlōFoot: A Second Patent-Pending Design, a Second Problem Solved
FloWorks Design didn't arrive at the KORE Summit with a single product and a pitch deck. The company unveiled two patent-pending designs on September 17, the second being the FlōFoot — a companion innovation that addresses a different but equally persistent problem in outdoor sports footwear and foot mechanics during trail use. While specific technical details about the FlōFoot continue to emerge as the company moves toward market, the fact that it was presented alongside the FlōPole as a complete patent-pending system suggests that FloWorks is building a coherent biomechanical philosophy, not just individual products.
Presenting two distinct innovations at a single summit appearance signals that FloWorks is not a single-idea company. The KORE Outdoors Summit, with its unusually rigorous audience of engineers and designers, was a deliberate choice of venue — the kind of room that will stress-test an idea far more honestly than a consumer trade show floor, where novelty often overwhelms scrutiny.
Why the KORE Summit Is the Right Room for This Kind of Debut
There's a reason FloWorks chose Kimberley over larger, flashier venues. The KORE Summit is built for exactly this kind of moment. Design engineers, retail business owners, sustainability experts, and industry thought leaders give presentations throughout the event, and the informal architecture of the summit — campfire socials, outdoor networking sessions on the mountain, group rides and runs — means that after a formal presentation, a designer can immediately get feedback from an athlete who just spent the summer testing similar products in the field.
One of the defining features of the KORE Outdoors Summit is the way it builds socializing and outdoor recreation into the event — the conference is held at the base of Kimberley Alpine Resort in the rugged Purcell Mountains. That setting isn't incidental. When gear designers, engineers, and serious outdoor athletes are literally walking the terrain together between sessions, conversations about what works and what doesn't take on a different quality than they do in a convention center in Denver or Salt Lake City.
The Summit features hands-on workshops, panel discussions, and networking opportunities — all focused on growing the outdoor rec-tech sector and building community across the Kootenays and beyond. For an American brand looking north for a harder, smarter audience, there's an argument that KORE offers something no domestic trade event currently does: a genuinely technical crowd with genuine passion for getting gear right.
The Broader Landscape: Where Innovation Is Actually Happening
The outdoor industry has a well-documented consolidation problem. Major conglomerates acquire promising small brands, streamline product lines, and sand off the edges of whatever made those brands interesting in the first place. The trekking pole category, in particular, has been dominated by a handful of European manufacturers for decades, with incremental carbon fiber upgrades and weight reductions serving as the primary competitive axes. Genuine rethinks of the fundamental grip-and-force architecture are essentially absent from the market.
That's the gap FloWorks is walking into. The patent-pending status of both the FlōPole and the FlōFoot indicates that the company believes its designs are genuinely novel under IP law — a bar that requires not just a good idea, but an idea that hasn't been done before in any registered form. For hikers and trail runners who have spent years adapting their technique around the limitations of conventional poles — shortening straps, loosening grips, changing hand position on steep terrain — a design that eliminates those adaptations at the mechanical level is worth paying serious attention to.
The Patent-Pending Significance
In outdoor gear, patent-pending status is both a legal marker and a competitive signal. It tells retailers that the design is protected, tells competitors that imitation carries legal risk, and tells consumers that they are looking at something genuinely new. For a small design firm like FloWorks, securing patent-pending status on two products before a major public unveiling reflects serious strategic planning — the kind that suggests the company is thinking well beyond the prototype stage.
The outdoor gear industry has seen this pattern before: a small, technically rigorous company identifies a biomechanical problem that major manufacturers have ignored because fixing it would require abandoning conventional architecture, develops a solution, protects it, and then either builds a brand around it or gets acquired by a player with the distribution muscle to scale it. Either path benefits the end user, as long as the core innovation survives the journey to market.
What It Means for the Hiker, the Fastpacker, and the Trail Runner
For the American outdoor community — the weekend backpackers doing 20-mile loops in the Rockies, the fastpackers pushing 50-mile days on the PCT, the trail runners whose pole use is increasingly common in technical mountain races — the FlōPole represents something worth watching closely. The wrist injury problem the design addresses is not abstract. Trekking pole-related wrist and tendon strain is a real clinical issue among serious hikers, and the most common advice from sports medicine professionals — keep your wrist straight, don't over-grip — is exactly the mechanical outcome the FlōPole engineers into the pole's design.
The strap-driven, centerline-force approach also has implications for multi-day use. On a three-day backcountry trip, the cumulative number of pole plants runs into the tens of thousands. If each of those plants is traveling through a bent wrist in a conventional system, the fatigue and injury risk compounds with every mile. If the FlōPole's claims hold up under long-term real-world testing — and the biomechanical logic is sound enough that there's good reason to believe they will — this is a product that could genuinely change how committed trekkers select and use their poles.
The Descent Factor
Poles earn their reputation on the descent. Ascending, many hikers barely notice the wrist angle — the effort is in the legs, the poles are just support. Descending steep, loose terrain is where the wrist position becomes critical and where injury risk spikes. A pole system specifically engineered to keep the wrist neutral and absorb shock through the strap mechanism rather than the joint addresses the highest-risk phase of trail use directly. For anyone who has ever had to baby an aching wrist through the final miles of a long descent, that design priority is immediately legible.
Looking Ahead: What Comes After Kimberley
The KORE Outdoors Summit is not a consumer marketplace — it's an industry event. The FlōPole and FlōFoot debuting there means the next phase involves navigating from a strong technical showing in front of an expert audience to a broader market presence. That path typically runs through specialty outdoor retailers, review placements in publications reaching serious hikers, and, increasingly, direct-to-consumer channels where a brand can tell its biomechanical story in full without the compression of a retail shelf tag.
KORE brings its Rehub Trailer to repair attendees' outdoor gear and apparel, and KORE makers showcase and sell their products at Summit events — a microcosm of the kind of direct feedback loop that helps small gear companies refine both their products and their market positioning before going wide. For FloWorks Design, the Kimberley unveiling is likely the beginning of a longer public conversation about what a trekking pole should actually do to the human body it's supposed to support.
The outdoor gear market rewards patience from companies that get the engineering right. The companies that have changed how people move through backcountry terrain — whether by rethinking boot stiffness, binding release geometry, or pack suspension — didn't do it by arriving with a polished marketing story before a proven product. They arrived with a proven product and let the trail miles do the convincing. Based on its KORE debut, FloWorks Design appears to understand that sequence. The FlōPole and FlōFoot are patent-pending, mechanically coherent, and built around a real problem that real hikers actually have. In a category defined by incremental improvement, that combination is rarer than it sounds.
