Summit 2

Description

13 years ago we had a crazy idea: have the wonderful people of Caribou Lodge visit the One Drop factory to design and manufacture a new collaboration yo-yo from scratch, film the whole process, and release it that weekend at a contest. The Summit yo-yo came into existence in just one hectic week and the documentary endures as a snapshot of both collaboration and a “How It’s Made” for modern metal yo-yos. It has become a document of a special time in yo-yoing and it’s wild to see us all looking so young. Oh, how time flies.

Last year, One Drop approached Caribou Lodge with a simple message: we’re better together. From there it didn’t take long for the idea of a Summit 2 to take shape. The basic idea was the same: design and manufacture a collaboration yo-yo in a few days, film the process and drop them at a contest that weekend. We quickly remembered that the time frame and goal for this idea are absolutely reckless and worried if we could pull it off again, now that we’re all older and need more sleep. Lucky for us, coffee came through! We knew we couldn’t repeat the magic of the first Summit. But this new adventure brought together folks from the first project and a slew of new faces, and is once again a reflection of a specific moment in yo-yo history. The experience of the first Summit served as a playbook, but 13 years on we created some new magic. The Summit 2 experience and resulting yo-yo, while building on the past, has it’s own character and story.

There will be a new documentary, but it will be released later because (good) editing takes time. While we wait, here is the short version:

With Steve and the Caribou team in Eugene, we started the process at a coffee shop on Monday morning discussing ideas for the design. We decided we wanted to capture the energy in the room, so no work was done in advance. Starting at square one with the simple question “responsive or unresponsive?” we talked through all kinds of ideas and ended up on a Side Effect Chief/Leaf. The profile would be Caribou Lodge and the cup would be One Drop: a perfect melding of the two brands that nodded to the original Summit while moving forward with a very different look and feel.

We went back to the One Drop factory and with Shawn at CAD controls surrounded by team players, the design was ironed out. Once the CAD was finalized, Shawn went to work and by that evening we had a raw prototype in players’ hands. Shawn’s years of experience and skill is why it was possible for this to happen so fast, and the electricity in the room when we realized we’d have prototypes on Day One was incredible. Testing began and everyone loved it but there was some discussion about adding a little weight. Because of the time frame, we decided to produce the initial, lighter version for the weekend release at the Pacific Northwest Regional Yo-Yo Contest. It played great and tweaking the weight for production would be simple. We decided to call this initial version the “First Draft” and we released 80 of them at PNWR in a cool unique blue color done by local anodizer BT. The willingness of BT to have all of us show up at their shop and anodize these in two hours was legendary. There is some amazing footage of this that will be in the documentary.

For production, nearly everyone agreed on adding 1 gram of weight but no one could agree on Side Effects. So each player who was present for the Summit 2 experience will eventually get their own “Player Edition” model with their color and Side Effects of choice. This final production version has the additional 1 gram of weight and we all agree it’s exactly what we hoped for. This project has already been more than we could dream and we are excited to share this first step into a new future of collaboration between One Drop and Caribou Lodge.