We were lucky to catch up with Ryan Hosegood recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Paper Peaks was born as a shower thought. The idea came during COVID in probably the one place I do the most imagining which is the shower. I was brainstorming different ideas that may be a viable business venture after a failed attempt at a matcha tea business. It was around the time that mountains were re-opening for riders as covid restrictions loosened slightly and I was outlining my favourite mountain and the one I grew up riding during spring break: Panorama. I was simply tracing out the runs from peak to bottom on water droplets that had collected on the glass partition and it just clicked at that moment that this may be something. So I raced out of the shower, grabbed a blank piece of white paper from my works printer that I got sent home with a year prior, and did the same mind tracing but with a permanent pen instead of on disappearing droplets. The name formed before I dove into the company to what it is today, drawing peaks on paper, ie Paper Peaks.

Ryan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Canadian Prarie boy, born and raised on the flat lands of Canada with small tastes of annual trips to the mountains. When you’re raised in an area that only allows you to snowboard in glorified ditches, there’s a sense of magic that is set upon the Rockies. There was a love for the mountains from that first trip out west when I was 5. Through sports growing up and into college, the opportunity to head out west to ride wasn’t possible and there was a great stretch of just imagining living out there and being closer to that part of this world that I love. In 2019 I had the opportunity to move to Los Angeles, and it was this move that re-ignited my passion. Of course, after a quick winter season of enjoying the local mountains, Big Bear, Snow Summit, and Mammoth, the world shut down that spring. With that flame back roaring, being shut out from the hills didn’t feel great, but the idea of creating a company around what I loved didn’t hit until a year later. Once the initial idea came to me, it was like a kid with access to unlimited candy. Besides my day job, I spent the majority of my free time, late into the night, designing my idea of the top 50 resorts in North America with the idea of using those creations to create a wide variety of products to “bring the mountains home”. We offer a variety of design printed goods such as wine tumblers to custom mouse pads. The goal from the beginning wasn’t to create a massive profitable company, it was more to stick with the process and see the idea through to the finish line. Starting to get some sales and working through different marketing ideas and how to take this company into 2024 had been the icing on the cake. We’re working with a partner in LA who sources our products and conducts the custom printing for us to keep our costs as low as possible, should we gain some more traction in the years to come, we would like to source and print ourselves to lower the costs for our end users. We’re just at the beginning of the run and there’s a long way down!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We’re just starting ourselves. We’ve had multiple attempts at this from videos along the way to unique ideas and posts to where we’ve landed today which is supplying users with snow forecasts and content surrounding their favourite mountains. What we’ve learned is that short-form content isn’t necessarily the best place to shove the narrative of “buy our products, here’s why”. For us, value comes from the end buyer, from experiences they’ve had at certain resorts of their hopes to eventually one day discover its slopes. We’re now in the ramp-up phase of simply supplying information and entertainment through information surrounding the resorts that we sell. Thus in-organically driving people to our site and hopefully, to our products. We have a very defined path moving forward and some unique ideas that we’re hoping to catch on. Where we’ve failed in the past and are striving to change in this next iteration is consistency. It’s easy to conceptually create an idea or plan; the actual execution and follow-through of posting consistently are where the labour of love comes in. That part can be tough past the initial honeymoon phase of the idea. Persistency and Consistency is our marketing model into 2024.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Once the initial builds of all the resorts were complete, which in itself took over a year. I then had to take each design and model it onto products individually. 13 Products, 50 Maps; you can do the math. A year and a half into this journey, post the initial idea, I finally had the bare roots of the company and now needed to focus on a website. While trying to gain as much information through YouTube University as I could, my regular day job was demanding a significant amount of my day, and the energy I had left to learn this process was completely fried. I gave up on the idea of creating this from scratch with as little money as possible and paid $2,000 to a group in India to complete my website for me. The problem with this was I had a vision and they had a budget. My ideas were too large for my wallet and we engaged in overnight back and forth for months before I finally caved in the spring of 2023 and had them make a few minor adjustments and I clicked launch the website. This was a mistake. The build was broken, slow, and blocked me from making any adjustments or enhancements without ruining the code they had built and crashing the whole site. So in the summer of this year, I shut the site back down, dove right into YouTube, and picked up where I had left off. Designing from scratch, a foreign concept to begin with, until the end of fall this year at the end of October, right before the winter 23/24 ski season kicked off that I re-launched the site. From scratch, with custom inputs and faster/cleaner than it had been built before.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://paperpeaks.com/
• Instagram: Paper Peaks / FlurCast
• Twitter: Paper Peaks / FlurCast
• Youtube: FlurCast