New edelrid portaledge

https://youtu.be/s-GpnC5LnJY?si=BPctynuAzIBPSWI3

I guess it's a real product. 

Available over there! When I asked an Edelrid rep about it around 6 months ago they said they won’t be importing it to the U.S. 🤷‍♂️

The lightest frame portal edge, eh?

So we'll be seeing Edelrid sponsored athlete Tommy Caldwell using these on his big wall adventures.

I wonder if this will be available in Canada 

It might only be my gut feeling, but I think it’s very interesting to see Edelrid bringing a lot of neat and somehow niche products to the market in relatively short time. A new portaledge, the screamer, the Ohmega, all featuring some very special use-cases in their design, documentation and certification. I would have thought that they would focus more on the broader market (idk, more sports climbing harnesses, or fancy colored slings?), but I will not complain!

Wonder what’s the driving force behind that. Does anybody know?

Pavel Pavelovishwrote:

It might only be my gut feeling, but I think it’s very interesting to see Edelrid bringing a lot of neat and somehow niche products to the market in relatively short time. A new portaledge, the screamer, the Ohmega, all featuring some very special use-cases in their design, documentation and certification. I would have thought that they would focus more on the broader market (idk, more sports climbing harnesses, or fancy colored slings?), but I will not complain!

Wonder what’s the driving force behind that. Does anybody know?

They're betting on the American market, Americans love their toys, same reason petzl is working on cams. 

My take from perspective of someone who works in product development  

Even though they’ve launched a lot of products recently in succession publicly (starting with the pinch I guess), seems like they’ve hired an S-load of mechanical engineers.

Short time for public launch - but I can assure you they’ve been working on this stuff for years. They must’ve gone through a big hiring boom. Maybe they hired a new C-level exec who is big into R&D in the past couple of years and they felt they were being forgotten about as a brand and that new hire wanted to throw again…an S-load of money into new product development. Agreeing with the comment above - this seems like a big shift in company culture - niche segment R&D.

Super cool. Keep at it. 

Pavel Pavelovishwrote:

I would have thought that they would focus more on the broader market (idk, more sports climbing harnesses, or fancy colored slings?), but I will not complain!

Wonder what’s the driving force behind that. Does anybody know?

It's hard to be a sustainable German company in just the harness and sling market when competing with lower-wage country manufacturers like Ocun and the like.

What keeps German companies afloat is usually innovation. Companies that fail to innovate usually go bankrupt. Run of the mill products can be developed cheaper elsewhere.