Home

10%

Sticker Shock

What goes into a $600 tripod, and why it matters.

Por Peak Design

The peak Design travel tripod is here.

Specifically, it's here, on Kickstarter.

Never in our deep annals of Kickstarter-dom (this is our 9th project) have we experienced quite so grand a reception from our backers and supporters. We are in total awe of the response, and while it is a daunting mission to produce tens of thousands of tripods of premium quality, we feel entirely up to the task. Our little team of 35 did our homework on this one.

As is the case with all things new and different, the Travel Tripod's debut has had few points of contention. Chief amongst this subset of feedback: sticker shock. A $600* carbon fiber tripod with a $350* aluminum alloy sibling. It ain’t the most expensive, but it certainly ain’t the cheapest. A pretty penny to pay for a thing that has a single job: hold another thing.

And you know what? That's a reasonable reaction. Have yourself some sticker shock. Feel it. Bask in it. And while you're doing that, we're going to observe the grand Peak Design tradition of over-sharing, trudging deep into the jungles of product design to give you an appreciation for all the little things that go into that price tag. We can’t promise you’ll feel differently (or still be awake) after reading this, but we can promise that we'll enjoy nerding-the-f-out while writing it.

*This story was written back in 2019. As of 2023, the MSRP for our Travel Tripods are $650 and $380, respectively. This price increase corresponds directly with our rising supply chain costs, something that pretty much every product company has wrestled with in the past few years.

Parts of a Whole

With any Peak Design product, you get what you pay for. So what do you get (besides innovation, efficiency, and a lifetime guarantee) when you buy a Travel Tripod? In the simplest of terms, 336 distinct parts—more parts than bones in the human body or countries in the world. For context, our next-most-complicated hard good is the Capture Camera Clip with 25 parts.

A few of the parts used in assembling a round of pre-production Compact Ball Head prototypes.

Early back-of-the-napkin concept sketches of a simple quick-release mechanism.

The Travel Tripod’s 336 parts come together to make up 8 distinct sub-assemblies (3 legs, hub, center column, center column knob, ball head, and mobile mount) which assemble into a product that stands 5 feet tall, yet packs down to the size of a water bottle. As you can imagine, manufacturing and assembly are tedious processes with literally hundreds of quality control checks throughout the development of parts, sub-assemblies, and final products.

We’re going to delve into a few key parts and processes that make the Peak Design Travel Tripod special. Spoiler: you’re about to hear the word “tube” a lot.

Leaving the Circle

Much like the internet, tripods are basically a series of tubes.

For years, travel tripods have had the same architecture: a tubular center column surrounded by 3 telescoping tubular legs, all connected by a metal hub. Nearly every travel tripod in the world, from a $1000+ Gitzo to a sub-$100 Amazon Basics, is designed this way.

Those tubes are always circular. Why? Because circular tubes are strong and stable, lightweight, and relatively cheap and easy to make. When you build a tripod out of circular tubes, you maximize strength and minimize cost. You don’t, however, minimize volume.

When we set out to build the most compact travel tripod we could, we knew the only way to truly minimize volume was to ditch circular tubes in favor of shapes that nested snugly together without leaving dead space in-between. We had to leave the circle. And when we did, all hell broke loose.

Wheeler from our engineering team (we think that's his name) holding a carbon fiber leg section.

Getting into Shape

Aluminum tripod legs are made through a process called extrusion. Metal is squeezed out through a form to create a tube, which you then cut to the desired size. Think “pasta maker,” or if you’re dictating this to a 4-year-old, ”Play-Doh press.”

Carbon tripod legs are traditionally made through one of two processes. The first is pultrusion. A machine, threaded with hundreds of spools of carbon fiber, pulls said fibers slowly through a series of progressive forming dies. While this is happening the carbon is impregnated with resin and simultaneously heat-cured. This magical machine can spit out infinite lengths of round carbon fiber tube, which is cut to desired size.

The other process for making carbon legs is called roll-and-cure. Sheets of resin-impregnated carbon fiber are rolled onto a round mandrel using automated rolling machines. These rolled forms are then heat-cured in a mold or large oven, and then the mandrel is removed and the tubes are cut to size.

Early aluminum leg prototypes with 3D printed cam hardware.

A fully assembled build of one of our later prototypes for the Aluminum Travel Tripod. Note the raw, unfinished legs and head. Also note the resemblance to a stack of ice-cold crispy boys.

Doing any of the aforementioned processes with a non-round shape creates a ton of complexity.

Extruding a non-round aluminum tube isn’t so hard: it’s the same process but with a non-round form. The hard part happens when you have to apply additional processes, like cutting, machining, and finishing. You can’t put a non-round tube through a roller or on a lathe, you have to use more time-consuming manual alternatives. Likewise, validating physical properties of a non-round tube is significantly harder than a circular tube. A circular tube is a simple, consistent shape with a single diameter and omnidirectional symmetry. Our non-round tripod legs are complex shapes with multiple sides and radii. There’s more to measure, more dimensions to check, more tests to run to validate tolerances and performance.

Things really get wacky with our carbon tripod legs. While circular carbon tubes can be built using automated pultrusion or rolling, our leg geometry requires a manual construction process to ensure consistent carbon fiber wrapping. Each segment has 8-12 layers of carbon weave that must be carefully placed by hand and then tightly wrapped by a machine that we had to custom-build. Each layer is oriented at a specific angle to optimize stiffness and strength. Wrapped segments are then placed in a precision steel mold and heated to cure. Like their aluminum counterparts, our carbon legs are also more challenging to machine and validate. The overall process is many times more laborious than making a round carbon tube of equal size and stiffness.

TLDR, non-round tubes are significantly harder and more expensive to make and inspect. But damn, they sure do pack down small.

Less is More

Congrats, you passed Makin’ Nonstandard Tubes 101. But wait! There’s more.

Our goal when designing the Travel Tripod was to take the features and performance that you’d demand from a pro photography tool and fit them all into a much smaller volume. That required looking beyond the legs, and redesigning every other core tripod part to take up less space while retaining the same strength and functionality.

Top: the hub of a Gitzo Series 1 Traveler tripod. Bottom: the hub of the Peak Design Travel Tripod.

Left: the Peak Design Compact Ball Head. Right: the Gitzo Series 1 Traveler tripod ball head. Bottom right: a thumb that got smashed sometime in the last 2 months.

Three travel tripods, setup with center columns down and hubs at the same height, showing the vertical efficiency of the Peak Design head and hub (left).

Take the hub—the metal part that connects the 3 legs with the center column. On a traditional tripod, this part has a diameter of about 4 inches and sits beneath the legs (when collapsed) or atop the legs (when deployed). To save space, our hub nests between the legs and the center column. It’s about 2.5 inches in diameter, and you can hardly see it when the Travel Tripod is collapsed. While our hub contains less material than a traditional hub, it takes substantially more machining to make it because it’s such an intricate shape.

Even more complex, our Compact Ball Head. We replaced bulky adjustment knobs with a low-profile ring that spans the circumference of the head. This saves space and makes for a cleaner experience, but requires a more complex internal mechanism to apply even pressure to the ball. Our significantly smaller ball head contains significantly more parts, each of which requires extra manufacturing and testing bandwidth.

More is More

Shrinking stuff? Check. Maintaining features and performance? Check. But we weren’t about to stop there.

We designed the tool we always wished a tripod could be. To us, an important part of that was making something that worked with the cameras we use most—the ones we literally don’t leave home without—our mobile devices. Our stowable mobile mount solves that in a very Transformers-y sort of way: lots of folding things, a secret hatch, and f’n magnets! And you guessed it, that stuff means more parts, more manufacturing, and more testing.

The mobile mount nests within the triangular center column. To remove it, twist and pull the aluminum load hanging hook. When in place, the load hanging hook is strong enough to hold well over 50 lbs (23kg).

The mobile mount clips onto mobile phones of all sizes, with our without case.

Our Digital Marketing Director, Elish, likes himself so much that he takes pictures of himself taking selfies.

The Travel Tripod also comes with a padded case designed by the award-winning Peak Design soft goods team. As you probably know, we are absolutely bonkers about the idea of carrying stuff. So we couldn't just make a tripod to carry your camera—we had to also make a bag to carry the tripod. And, of course, it's real nice.

A prototype case for the Travel Tripod, made from waterproof charcoal melange neoprene with a weatherproof zip closure and Hypalon tie-down straps on the side.

Done Right

It’s our mission to make the best things.

The preceding paragraphs hopefully give a window into the processes that we believe it takes to make something we can confidently call the best. But there’s more to our mission than just that.

It’s our mission to succeed at the expense of nobody.

The majority of people who make Peak Design products (500+) work in our partner factories in Vietnam and China. They aren't direct Peak Design employees, but they are equally entitled to happy, satisfying lives. We are not successful unless they partake in that success. Hence, we negotiate fair pay and safe working conditions in our factories. We invest in 3rd party audits to confidently hold ourselves accountable to this objective. We also visit frequently...at any given time there’s a 70% chance that members of our design team are in our overseas factories working and/or playing 5-on-5 basketball with the staff.

Members of the PD team visiting with one of our contract manufacturing facilities near Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

It’s also in our mission to offset our environmental impact.

Making and shipping stuff creates pollution, and the costs of reducing/removing that pollution are baked into our business model. We work hard to reduce the pollution we create by investing in less harmful materials and production processes. Whatever we can’t reduce, we pay to remove. The Travel Tripod is carbon neutral. In fact, all of Peak Design is carbon neutral. That means we’ve offset the entirety of our carbon footprint, from the extraction of raw materials from the Earth to shipping products to end customers.

And it’s also in our mission to treat our customers as peers and to prioritize happiness over growth.

That means price gouging is not in our vocabulary. Our products all have fairly similar margins (mark-ups to sustain the business) based on the cost of parts and complexity of assembly. It is our job to design products and then truthfully explain their benefits in a way that makes their appeal and utility readily apparent to our customers. If the market will bear the cost to purchase the product, our business gets to keep going. We want to keep designing radical products and running a business we are proud of. We believe transparency in communication and honesty in pricing are paramount to a continued healthy relationship with our customers.

(The sixth pillar of the mission is to use our voice to inspire positive change, and we’ve got a busy summer planned in that arena, but we’ll save that for another note...)

Peak Design: not Known for brevity.

So, what goes into the price tag of a $600 travel tripod? More parts, smaller parts, harder to make parts, harder to assemble and inspect parts. A smaller size, equal performance, extra functionality, and delightful user experience. A tripod made by fairly paid workers in safe conditions. A tripod that is made, assembled, and shipped with zero net carbon emissions. A tripod guaranteed for life. Shit, guess we could’ve just said that instead of writing this whole thing.