As reported by Fred Langan
In the Hills magazine
Winter, Volume 10, Number 4, 2003

Designer scores with innovative hockey gear

Like many Canadian boys, Greg Collins dreamed of playing in the NHL; instead he became a major player in the design of protective sports gear

People who grew up in the country sometimes tell the old yarn about walking five miles to school. Greg Collins grew up in suburban Don Mills, and his gripe is that he used to walk a mile and a half to the hockey rink with a bulky duffle bag weighing him down.

Zap forward a couple of decades and the boy from Don Mills solved his problem by designing the perfect hockey bag.

"I came up with a concept for a knapsack hockey bag," he says. "Every piece of equipment has a compartment. There is a trunk for your pants and a separate pocket for your helmet and gloves." There's also a special place to hold skates so the blades don't dig into your back. All in a package that looks like a familiar knapsack.

It was easy to carry and easy to sell. Greg designed the Hockey Pac for Bauer, the sporting goods and hockey equipment company, and it sold in the thousands around the world. Since then, the hockey designer has moved on to dream dozens of other things, even helping a group that had come up with a new way to surface a hockey rink with a Zamboni.

"In that case someone came to us with an idea that needed polishing. It was like turning a science project into reality," says Greg.

Greg designed a lightweight cowling to fit on an ice resurfacing machine to hide a system that sprays the ice with drops of water, making the surface freeze faster, harder and with more energy efficiency than the old system of flooding rinks.

In mid-winter Greg would probably be grateful for a Zamboni of his own to clear the snow from his pond in Adjala. It's an acre of frozen water, and some years, if the snow is light, he'll try to clear off most of it. But he always clears enough for a big hockey rink. The pond is his favourite place to play, and a great source of wintertime activity for his children, Mackenzie, 11, and Madeline, 9.

Thursday nights Greg plays centre in an old-timers' hockey league at the Teen Ranch arena south of Orangeville. He also plays pick-up hockey with friends on Tuesday mornings.

"I've played hockey my whole life. I wanted to be a professional hockey player when I was young, until I realized I wasn't big enough and I started too late." He remembers how much time he spent at the rink as a boy. "I would be at the rink at eight in the morning and playing a game at eight at night."

Designing hockey gear for pros and amateurs is a job he seems to have prepared for all his life. He developed some of his first designs in his original studio in downtown Toronto. Today, he works surrounded by trees, next to the pond which is almost hidden at the edge of the woods.

Greg operates his company, Pace Design, from his home on the 4th Line of Adjala Township. The house was designed with separate, spacious studio areas for Greg's company as well as for his wife, Susan Darrach, who operates her own graphic design company. One corner of Greg's studio almost hides all the modern infrastructure, connections for phone lines and networking hubs for computers.

Arrayed on the walls and shelves around his office are pictures of hockey equipment and other sports gear Greg has had a hand in producing. Right away one item particularly catches the eye. A stylish pair of hockey gloves in a natural tan colour.

These armoured gloves used in hockey to protect hands and wrists from pucks, blades and sticks, are odd in a couple of ways. They are shorter than most, not extending as far up the arm. And they are held together with oversized stitching, more like baseball gloves than hockey gloves. They are even inscribed with a famous name from the baseball world: Rawlings.

"Rawlings, as you know, is a baseball company and they wanted to get into the hockey business," says Greg as he holds and displays a glove with the same loving care an expert from the Antiques Road Show holds a porcelain cup. "They had Brett Hull [endorsing and wearing their products] and we thought we should do something really special for the 1996 All-Star Game, so I designed these gloves."

The gloves have the look and feel of baseball gloves, with natural kid leather covering the protective armour. Hockey players, including Brett Hull, loved them because hockey players, as Greg has found out, are vain. They are performers and on their stage, the hockey rink, they like to look, well, cool.

"You give hockey players something to wear and the first thing they do is go look in a mirror," says Greg. "But they are suspicious of anything that's new."

New or not, the design of the gloves was so striking that they acquired instant star status of their own, easily earning more in free publicity for Rawlings than the company had ever spent on the design and production of Brett Hull's gloves.

"They were ready for the '96 All-Star Game. And I'll never forget watching as the announcer pointed them out on the broadcast, and then zoomed right in on these gloves and talked about them at length. And this was on national television."

Not all Greg's winter designs are macho. While he has worked on dozens of men's hockey skates, he has also come up with an idea for a girl's skate, inspired in part by his daughter Madeline. "We found out a lot of girls borrow their brother's skates because they're more comfortable," Greg says. "Girls don't all want to look like ice dancers."

So Greg designed a line of soft-boot women's skates, half way between hockey and figure skates. The Softec line is one of his best selling designs.

Greg Collins began designing hockey and sports gear straight out of the industrial design program at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1981. It wasn't luck; it was what he wanted to do. There were lots of things that brought it all together though. His mother was a portrait artist and his father was a graphic designer as well as a sculptor, working with bronze and fibreglass moldings. When he was young, Greg watched and learned as his father worked.

"The art component was always there in the family," says Greg. "As a kid I was interested in how things were made."

Greg's first job was working in the research and development department of Cooper Canada, the big manufacturer of sports gear. Their name, emblazoned on goalies' hockey pads and stamped on baseball gloves, was synonymous with sports. For a 22-year-old sports fanatic, it was heaven.

"Cooper was like a candy store for a designer. Under one roof, it had all the technologies you could ever imagine. It had sewing. It had molding. People had these amazing skills from cutting to knitting to sewing. They made their own fabrics. They even had their own tannery."

During his four years at Cooper, Greg learned about all those things that go into the design and manufacture of a new hockey glove or shin pad. It was like earning a PhD in sports design. And with that under his belt he struck off on his own.

Since then, Greg Collins has become one of the top designers of hockey equipment in the world. He does design other things, though. They include a riding helmet for Tipperary. Pace Design took the existing tooling for a bicycle helmet and turned it into an equestrian helmet.

"We changed people's notions of what an equestrian helmet could look like. It's lighter, better ventilated and more durable, though not as traditional. It works." It is also a big seller around the world.

One of Greg's proudest achievements is the work he did for Hespeler. The Canadian company had a small niche market in the hockey equipment industry when it approached Pace Design for help in the mid-nineties. Greg and his long-time employee, Henry Alves, took on all aspects of the company's equipment design and marketing, including packaging and graphic design. Within four years, Hespeler had become a major, multi-million dollar player in the industry. (It has since been sold to an American company.)

Over the years sports equipment companies have picked up a lot of free publicity by printing big logos on their gear, from tennis shirts to hockey pads. But a few years ago, the National Hockey League ruled a company logo could be no more than two inches on the front of the pad.

Since then, Pace Design has worked on a new set of goalie pads for Koho. There were new materials, more durable padding and the compliant small logo set in the middle of the pads - pads that would be worn by superstar goalie Patrick Roy. But while he was at it, Greg used contrasting colours in the leather facings to work in the big K that is the brand logo of Koho. A giant K on each pad, all quite legal - a functional design that promotes the name in an understated way.

This winter Greg Collins is not as obsessed with hockey as usual. He's dreaming of the spring and summer, when the snow is off the ski hills and he can get out to see his latest invention in action: a mountain board.

The board, which looks like a shortened snowboard on wheels, is the latest in a series of design prototypes that Greg has worked through with his employee Brent Sasiela.

"The idea is to mimic the ride of a snowboard on land - to have the same action and feel. This is a sport that could really take off," he says, showing a visitor how to balance on his 'Grit' board.

Greg and Brent have also developed the protective gear to go with the sport. The gear is designed to be worn underneath clothing. The torso pads, stretching from shoulder to thigh, look like rubber armour for a gladiator. The lower half looks like padded long johns.

It isn't the first time Greg has seen a new sport in the making. Back in 1990 he came up with a marriage of a roller blade and a hockey skate, perfect for in-line hockey.

"Sure it was a new market. But we drew on our previous experience designing hockey skates."

Who knows what's next from the design shop in the Adjala woods.

Fred Langan is a freelance writer and broadcaster.
Photos by Pete Paterson.
Copyright © 2003 In the Hills magazine, All Rights Reserved.