A few machines, worktables, rolls of technical material, and one clear focus: making gear that performs in vertical terrain.

The brand is called Inselberg, and it isn’t chasing seasonal drops or building oversized collections. It was founded to bring gear development closer to the environments and people it serves.

Founded in 2021 by Jarlath Anderson, Inselberg began with a simple belief: the best technical gear should be developed with the people who rely on it. Most outdoor products are made too far from the conditions they’re intended for. Design happens in one place. Sampling in another. Testing, if it happens at all, often comes too late to influence the final product. Inselberg was built to change that by doing everything in-house and in collaboration with alpine professionals from day one.

Every product is prototyped, refined, and tested in the brand’s New Zealand lab. Patterns are redrawn. Materials are evaluated side by side. Construction methods are adjusted based on how the gear performs in the field. Most pieces go through more than a dozen iterations before they’re finalized. It’s not about perfectionism. It’s about precision.

That level of control allows Inselberg to focus on the details that affect performance but often go unnoticed. Seam tolerances. Articulation under movement. How a jacket handles under load or when scraped against rock. Requirements come directly from alpine professionals, whose input shapes each detail from the first prototype onward. “Each product starts with a brief based on a real problem. Not a moodboard,” says Anderson. “We don’t design to fill categories. We design to solve.”

The name Inselberg comes from a geological formation. A steep-sided, isolated rock that rises out of flat surroundings. It’s a fitting metaphor. This isn’t a brand trying to be everywhere. It focuses on doing one thing well: crafting high-quality technical gear for vertical terrain.

It’s a quiet model. But an intentional one.

And while the brand is still small, that’s the point. Inselberg isn’t trying to scale fast or become the loudest name on the mountain. It’s trying to make gear that feels right the moment you put it on, because it was made, tested, and refined by people who needed it to work.