Outdoor adventures and job ventures, wrapped in one

Lori Kaye Lodes

Contributor

February 17, 2025

LA CROSSE – The Redfeather Outdoors brand is well-known in the marketplace for its handcrafted, American-made snowshoes.

But the brands created behind the scenes by ORC Industries, Andrew Vittone – director of sales and marketing – said, are expanding into new territories.

Vittone said ORC Industries is the not-for-profit organization that supplies the workforce for Redfeather Outdoors brands – including snowshoes, tactical gear (tents, ponchos and tarps) and canoes.

Collectively, he said these are primarily made by ORC Industries employees – 75% of whom are people with physical or mental disabilities that the organization trains and supports through vocational programs, wellness initiatives and life skills development. 

And, as of late 2024, Vittone said ORC Industries has broadened its horizons with a new endeavor, also employing ORC Industries employees, called ORG Logistics. 

Logistics starts close to home
Vittone said the new adventure, ORC Logistics, is housed in a building next to the Redfeather canoe shop –  a building that used to house an aquaponics operation that closed in 2019.

Having the 60,000-square-foot building sit dormant, he said, didn’t sit well with the leadership team, and they decided to transform the space for logistics and inventory management.

Transforming the space from a basil and tilapia-raising operation to a technologically-focused one, Vittone said required the installation of warehouse pallet racking and investment in eight autonomous mobile robots.

Every location within the warehouse, he said, is assigned a location, and the robots – called chucks – are GPS mapped for the warehouse to know where every product is housed.

“The idea behind is that some of our team members who have taken several steps in vocational training can work here,” he said.

Vittone said some of the light assembly team members have named the robots Mario, Luigi, Scooby-Doo and Shaggy.

The robots, he said, are loaded with orders and then tell the employee where to put a picked item into a box based on the product size and weight.

Vittone said employees follow the robot to pick items, with the robot showing pictures of the items to pick and driving exactly to where the product is housed in the warehouse.

“It doesn’t park three feet ahead or behind – it parks exactly where the item is,” he said. “It then points if the item is to the left or right.”

Vittone said employees scan the UPC for accuracy, which the robot confirms onscreen, and then places it in the proper box on the robot.

“The cart might have six boxes on it for six orders, and it lights up which box to put the item into,” he said.

Once an order is fulfilled, Vittone said the robot returns to the station where an employee is sitting, performs another confirmation of accuracy, weighs it, packs it and applies the shipping label.

The employees pick orders, he said, then return to a meeting point to find another robot to start on other orders.

Currently, Vittone said several employees work in the warehouse alongside a warehouse manager who is coordinating the installation of a new warehouse management software. 

The ORC Industries team, he said, picked its first order in October 2024 when it also added its first external customer to the mix in addition to supporting Redfeather Outdoors.

“We are looking to broaden the work there as we have plenty of room,” he said. “It’s a reinvention that just makes sense for ORC Industries.”

Vittone said ORC Logistics offers the opportunity for ORC Industries employees to remain challenged and consider other job responsibilities.

He said he likens the work at ORC Industries to a staircase, with individuals with disabilities starting in light assembly, moving into handiwork if they are capable of doing more, then escalating to the cutting and sewing operation or snowshoes if they take another step up, moving to canoes if they have additional aptitude and now, rising to the warehouse as another stair in the staircase. 

“We’re particularly excited to offer some of our employees another (work) option,” Vittone said. 

Vocational opportunities abound
Vittone said the entire premise of ORC Industries is to offer meaningful employment to individuals with disabilities.

ORC Industries is both a manufacturer and a nonprofit, which he said was established to enhance the lives of people with disabilities through employment opportunities.

Vittone said it is located at the aptly named Commerce Street in La Crosse, with additional locations in Arcadia and Brownsville, Texas.

The Arcadia location, he said, performs a lot of handwork and hand packaging for a larger furniture manufacturer, whereas Brownsville focuses on the organization’s cut-and-sew operation for tarps and tents and commercial laundry.

Vittone said the commonality among all the locations is the mission-driven focus of providing viable employment for about 300 individuals with disabilities – including 75 in La Crosse, 25 in Arcadia and the remaining 200 in Brownsville.

“We have different (work) levels with ORC,” he said. “Our light assembly is often performed by our more severely disabled or lower-functioning individuals.”

Vittone said the environment is a supportive one, and employees often work with ORC Industries for the long term.

One employee in the cutting room, he said, recently retired after a 40-year career with ORC – with others having 20- to 30-year tenures.

“One of our more recent success stories was a woman who was homeless and sleeping on the steps of the Salvation Army,” he said. “We started her in snowshoes, and she’s been here for three years now. She has her own apartment and is back on her feet.”

Vittone said ORC Industries is excited for 2026 when it will celebrate its 60th year of fulfilling the mission it has held since its inception and the products strongly associated with the organization.

Since 1976, ORC Industries has supplied the U.S. Armed Forces and Special Operations Forces not only with the U.S. Navy’s Dixie Cup Hat – a Naval tradition since 1880 – but also ponchos, the Improved Rainsuit, soft shell jackets and pants, wind shirts, hard shell rain suits, field tarpaulins, tents and more.

“The white sailor Dixie caps – that’s where ORC got its start,” Vittone said.

Product evolution
Vittone said the business side of things began to significantly evolve in 2006 when ORC Industries purchased Redfeather snowshoes and began manufacturing and distributing Redfeather products.

In 2007, he said the organization bought Bell Canoe, a canoe brand, but shuttered the doors on canoe production in 2011 for a variety of reasons.

Vittone said when he joined the organization in 2021, he began researching the return of canoe production but knew they couldn’t bring it back as Bell Canoe, as that former owner had started another canoe business.

“We made the decision to bring it back under the Redfeather Canoes name,” he said. “It became a personal passion of mine and the president’s as we both enjoy the Boundary Waters.”

Building the first composite canoe, Vittone said, was no small feat – since no one who had been involved in canoe production in the past was still with the organization.

He said all he had to go off of was a two-page, handwritten document outlining instructions on how to build one.

However, Vittone said he persisted, and the team perfected the process and canoes appeared in the mix of Redfeather products during the last season. 

Though many people are drawn to the Redfeather brand name for snowshoes, Vittone said ORC Industries has added more to that product line as well.

When he joined the team, Vittone said the snowshoes wore really well but only featured a plain-colored vinyl with a small, heat-transferred logo.

That, he said, led ORC Industries to bring in a wide format flatbed printer and CNC cutting machines to allow Redfeather to add design and new looks to the otherwise plain snowshoes. 

“The whole line looks different than it did, and it’s opened up a custom market for us that we didn’t have before,” he said. 

To start, Vittone said ORC Industries created 70 custom pairs of snowshoes for the Oskar Blues Brewery in Colorado for its Wild Basin Hard Seltzers as a giveaway.

The customization option, he said, now extends to schools’ snowshoes to reflect their colors, as well as branding snowshoes for Nordic centers that buy Redfeather snowshoes and rent them. 

Vittone said work is underway on a new plastic snowshoe that will capitalize on ORC Industries’ injection molders.

He said he hopes to introduce that product next season.

Vittone said ORC Industries is one of only a few companies that sell replacement bindings for its snowshoes. 

“We support our customers with replacement parts that we make here, so rather than spend $200 for new snowshoes, they can get new bindings for $60 and get another 10 years out of them,” he said.

Vittone said the demand surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by many businesses unable to obtain their imported orders.

Many shops selling snowshoes are used to placing their orders a year in advance to prepare for the next season, whereas Redfeather can be much more responsive and deliver. 

“If in November a shop decides they need to order snowshoes, they can order with us and get them now,” he said. “We do a preseason program that offers a nice discount, but we always have inventory available. Most people are shocked that we can ship them so fast.”

As the organization heads into 2025, Vittone said his research and development mindset is already turning, thinking about making the tents ORC Industries already makes every day for the military available for a broader audience. 

“That would be a relatively easy thing to introduce under the Redfeather name,” he said. “We’re working on commercial camping equipment and making dry bags and different packs good for camping. We’ve got some good stuff underway in R&D as we’re looking to expand that Redfeather presence. We have the technology to be able to do so – we just need more hands in product development.”