A familiar Portland business name has landed a critical role with a swiftly growing manufacturer.
Rob Langstaff, the former Adidas North America president who also served in a top spot with Keen Footwear, became Carbitex’s CEO in October. His new company creates flexible carbon fiber composites used in several goods, including Porsche Design’s luggage line.
The company, though, has shifted its attention to performance footwear, forging partnerships for its flexible materials to provide stability within shoes made by Adidas, Scott, Saucony and Lake Cycling, among others.
Langstaff brings deep footwear industry knowledge to the company, founded by Junus Khan in 2012. Carbitex employs 55 workers in Kennewick, Washington. It has closed two venture capital rounds, including a $6 million raise that closed in September. Its investors including Michael Marks, who’s backed several smashes over the years.
Langstaff discussed those wins, as well as his vision for his new employer, in an early December conversation over Zoom. Here’s a part of our discussion, edited for brevity.
What drew you to Carbitex? There are a lot of applications for carbon fiber, but (Junus Khan) could see it very clearly in footwear. And that's where I came in. The CEO at the time, was getting ready to retire, so they went on a search to find a footwear guy and started talking to me. At first, I didn't know much about carbon fiber. But the more I got into it, the more intrigued I became. It’s kind of a game changer for the industry. It could be like Air was to Nike. Except the difference is, we're not exclusive to any brand.
I was inspired by a number of things. Number one was the characteristic of the (material). And, of course, the team. Also, the investors behind it are interesting. The lead investor is Michael Marks, a former CEO of Flextronics. He was also an early investor in Zappos, an early investor in Crocs, an early investor in GoPro. He sees game-changing technologies or game-changing brands, and he gets in and supports them.
Tell me a little bit about your role within your partner brands. As a branded technology partner, we work closely with our brand partners to integrate our technology into the design of their shoes, to integrate into their manufacturing processes and to launch into market. For example, Adidas is one of our footwear brands partners, and we've got this plate in the The adidas Speedflow Messi El Retorno [a very limited release], the shoe that Lionel Messi is playing with is engineered with our DFX technology. There’s quite a bit of back and forth in how we get that plate optimized into the ecosystem of the shoe. outsole of the shoe or between the outsole and the midsole of the shoe. So we have this material, but the material plate geometry needs to be designed to get the optimal performance characteristics [for Carbitex’s partners’ shoes].
I’m guessing that because it’s lightweight, it could apply to running shoes. We have a couple of running shoes coming out. We’re in Scott (the Speed Carbon) and a Saucony trail shoe. It gives support and will also give you a platform to spring off of, so there's a propulsion effect.
Right now, you’re based in Kennewick. Right, we're manufacturing here in Kennewick. We have a plant here. A lot of that was to protect the intellectual property on how we could create this plate in order to have the performance characteristics I described.
But we need to look for partners in Asia, or look to build our own factory in Asia. Since many of our customers produce their footwear there, it’s a supply-chain nightmare. To get raw materials from Asia, we bring them back to Kennewick, Washington. We produce them and then we ship them. We ship completed parts back to Asia. Not only is it a high cost, it’s not a good carbon footprint. So we're looking at keeping the U.S. manufacturing for potentially military products that we could provide. But for the global footwear industry, in general, we’ll look for an Asian manufacturing source.
We are thinking of moving the office closer to our customer base. And Portland would be an obvious (place). But I’m concerned about the business environment in Portland. You see the high taxes, high crime, high homelessness, and a business unfriendly environment. So we're also looking at potentially Vancouver across the river. A lot of other brands are in a similar situation where Portland offered a lot of advantages and, to be frank, squandered them.
What are some of your other goals for the company? We should be growing at well over 100% a year. We grew more than 100% last year to this year. And next year we’ll grow probably 300%. We just attended the Running Event trade show down in Austin, Texas. and every major running brand is speaking with us. Carbon is the new black. We have the properties no one else has. It’s an exciting place for us to be.
You’ve worked for two Portland footwear icons (Adidas and Keen). What are some of the things you’re bringing to Carbitex from them? I'm probably the first pure footwear guy who was hired here…I'm bringing a view on how to optimize our technology within that ecosystem. Which factories manufacture? Which brands? How do we partner with those factories? How do we design together? We're looking at bringing in some design software with which the factory, the brand and us can work together so we can have a seamless way to design our technology. I'm bringing a lot of the footwear knowledge into that.
