Sir Edmund Hillary died today, at the age of 88. As I heard this on the news, my first thought was "the Hillary Sweater"!
The Hillary Sweater was one of my major challenges when I worked for TravelSmith Outfitters, as a Menswear Product Manager. At that time, the Men's Division still featured some products that were rooted in the history of travel, and my boss Scott (the company's co-president), was determined that we were going to find and sell the Hillary Sweater, the original sweater worn by Hillary on his climb of Mount Everest. I think that Scott had gone to school with Tenzig Norgay's son and was always fascinated with Hillary. We were going to run that sweater, and I was going to be the one to find it.
Finding this sweater was like climbing Everest. My sherpa came in the form of our Product Assistant, David. He was better at navigating the internet, and had the time to put in the many phone calls it would take to track this thing down. Months went by. We did not find the sweater. It was like climbing Everest in a blinding snowstorm. I began to refer to it as "the fucking Hillary Sweater".
Remember on "Seinfeld" when Elaine worked for J. Peterman? Remember the Urban Sombrero? This was my Urban Sombrero episode. I did not understand the significance of this sweater or why we needed to run it, but Scott was determined and it was my job to get it done.
Finally, we found it. I don't remember exactly how, but we tracked down the original company that made the sweaters, who unbelievably were still manufacturing them exactly as they had been made so many years before. It was a little factory on one of the Shetland Isles in Great Britain, with very limited production and could make only the sizes that their looms would allow. We had to explain in the catalog copy that a size Large was more like today's size Medium, as the specs had not changed in 50 years, when bodies were not Supersized as they are today.
In the end, we didn't sell that many of them. But it gave the Holiday catalog a little romance, and it was definitely something that you wouldn't have see anywhere else. But really, the end product was not what we were most proud of. What was important was the journey, what we learned along the way, and that we didn't give up until we found it. I think that Sir Hillary would have appreciated that life lesson.
