For our latest Q&A, we travelled to Sheffield to visit Buffalo Systems at their home in the city, spending time with the team, photographing behind the scenes and sitting down with adventurer, broadcaster and author Ben Fogle, who has recently become part of the next chapter in the Buffalo story.
Founded in Sheffield in 1979, Buffalo has built a devoted following for its uncompromising approach to outdoor clothing - designing and manufacturing kit made to perform in demanding conditions and, importantly, to last. Now, with Ben having invested in the company, that distinctly British story is entering a new chapter.
As Buffalo arrives at The Sporting Lodge, we talk to Ben about the landscapes that have shaped him, lessons learned from Everest and a life of expedition, the importance of slowing down, finding adventure closer to home, and his ambitions for the future of Buffalo.
You've explored some of the most remote places on Earth, but is there one particular landscape or wilderness that has stayed with you more than any other?
I think mountains. Mountains are my place. I think we all have a natural environment in which we feel very at home. For many people, it's by the sea. We're an island nation, and I love the sea, by the way. I love the ocean. I always thought I'd live next to it, but nothing makes my heart sing like the mountains.
I've climbed a lot of mountains. For me, the seminal experience was Everest, as cliched as that sounds. I climbed Everest in 2018 with Kenton Cool, who this year had his 20th successful summit. So, I went with someone who really knew his stuff, and the whole experience was a highlight of my life. I loved the toughness of it. I loved the danger of it. I loved the beauty. I loved the trials, the tribulations. I think that, for me, what makes an expedition so unique is the challenge that you are faced with physically and mentally, and for me, Everest was the perfect encapsulation of that. I was out there for about four or five weeks, and it's like you have lived a lifetime in that period because you have faced death. You've looked at death. You have seen death. There are dead bodies. You see two-mile sheer drops. The line between life and death is so visceral, and nothing makes you feel more alive than staring death in the face.
So whether climbing Everest or spending time with people living off grid, what have these experiences taught you about the value of simplicity and carrying only what you really need?
The reality is we are all living too fast with too much. We are over-consuming. And actually, my lifestyle has remained largely the same. I live in a bricks and mortar house. I've got a heat exchange system and, you know, I try to be environmental, but I still live the life of a consumer. But my consumerism has changed in that I like to buy things that will last.
So, I'm a firm believer that we should buy premium, buy once. I forget the actual term, but it’s a bit like Buffalo. Without wanting to wedge it in, but you buy Buffalo and it will last for 30 years. It's not a great business model, but for me, that's the perfect form of environmental consumerism. So, if there's one thing I've learnt, it's that we need to slow down a little bit.
It's living just too fast. We're spending way too much time looking down, looking at our feet when we race from point A to point B. Looking down at our phones, looking down at our screens, with endless 24-hour rolling information being absorbed perpetually. Whereas when you're in the wild on an expedition, living with people in the wild, you are forced to slow down. You have to live without, you have to preserve and conserve. You have to be resourceful, less wasteful, and you have to learn the beautiful lost art of boredom. It's a skill that has been lost.
A large amount of our customers enjoy life outdoors in the UK, from hiking, fishing, camping and more. Do you think adventure is more about mindset than destination?
Absolutely. Adventure is all relative to you and what you know and what you do. So if you are like me, I have to push the boundaries a little bit to get a general frisson of adventure and excitement in the outdoors. The beauty of an adventure is that it's tailored to each and every one of us. So for me, buying a business like Buffalo is a terrifying adventure. I'm way more comfortable on Everest. But for lots of your readers, they would be much more comfortable talking figures and cashflow sales than they would walking through a crevasse field on a mountain. And that's the beauty of humanity, that we're all different. We all have different expertise in different areas.
But in answer to the specifics of the question, the outdoors and adventure is much more a mindset than it is the physicality of it. You can go to the wildest place on earth, but if you're still connected to a device, if you're still connected up here in your head, if you're still feverishly doing stuff and consuming, you're not really there. In the same way, you could be in a park in inner-city Manchester or Sheffield, and if you don't have a device, and you sit there for 30 minutes and you start listening to the birdsong, and you start observing the flora and the fauna and the changing blossom as it flowers and those tiny little details of seasonal change, you can mentally suddenly be in the wildest place in the world amongst the most urban of environments.
After all of your expeditions around the world, where in the British Isles do you return to when you want to slow down and reconnect with nature?
The Hebrides. The Outer Hebrides have always been my happy place. I first went there when I was seven years old, to the Isle of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides. And then obviously I kind of had my career break living on the Isle of Taransay when I took part in the Cast Away project for the BBC 26 years ago. And ever since I have loved the Western Isles. I've done a series for the BBC for the last few years called Sacred Isles, about the kind of spiritual pull of islands and the Western Isles in particular. And I have been lucky enough to go to almost every island, or certainly every main island in the Western Isles, and actually Orkney and Shetland as well, and I love it. It's where I feel most at home. I love the wildness, I love the isolation, I love the bleakness, I love the weather. Everything about it, it's a happy place. It's my happy place.
If you could encourage someone to take just one first step towards a more adventurous life this summer, what would it be?
I would do what I used to do as a child. Look at a map, a proper map. Go online or go to an old store and actually find a proper map of Britain. Not necessarily on your phone, because you want to see the whole thing. You want to have perspective of the distances and just let your eyes wander all across the British Isles, and look for the place you know the least about.
For me, a good example was the Wirral. I'd never been to the Wirral before, as a classic example, and I'd heard so much about the Wirral. I went for the first time in my life this year. This extraordinary little peninsula, that would be a classic case that as a child I would have looked at a map and thought, “What a strange name, The Wirral. It looks almost like an island. It's almost cut off.” So, a younger me would have thought, “I wonder what it's like there.” And for me, that visit was beautiful because I got to see a whole place that I'd never been to before where the sea has retracted and it's now just a kind of dried-up estuary.
Another good example would possibly be that Norfolk is your blind spot or maybe Middlesbrough. I actually did some filming at the Tees Barrage. It’s an amazing place if you're into kayaking.
I don't think there are many people who have visited more of the UK than me, obviously because I spent 15 years of my life doing Countryfile, one day every single week for 15 years in a different part of the UK, and then I did five years on Countrywise for ITV, as well as everything else. So, I really pride myself that I really do know the British Isles. There are still blind spots, and the Wirral was one of them for me. So anyway, in answer to your question, look at a map and go to the place you know the least.
So where do you see Buffalo in, let's say, five years' time?
Ideally, it would be lovely to think that Buffalo is a nationally recognized brand. Its awareness will grow as we've made a documentary for Channel Five following our first year. So, cameras followed us from the very first day when we announced to all the staff here that we were taking over. It's really warts and all. It's definitely a very honest portrayal of the highs and the lows and the rollercoaster, so I think a lot more people will hear about Buffalo anyway, just through the television series. Whether they like it or whether they want to buy it is another thing, but I think, as any business owner will know, it's the scale of growth that is absolutely key and if we try to go too big too fast, we will implode. We have deliberately not sought big investment, we've got no big equity backer, it‘s literally James and myself who've poured everything in. All profit is being poured back into the company but how sustainable that is and for how long, I don't know. We already are bursting at the seams in terms of production, we can't make enough stuff!
It's a great place to be, I suppose, but we genuinely can't produce enough, so I hope there will be expansion here in Sheffield, I hope we can have a bigger factory. We've already hired 10 new staff since coming on board, so we've made a huge number of leaps already.
As I said before, we have this amazing space in the centre of Sheffield called Base Camp, and our plans are that anyone who buys a jacket will automatically become a member of our club, the Steel and Grit Club, and they have access to our little club. This is about community. When you buy a jacket, you're buying much more than that, and in our clubhouse, we'll have talks. We've already had Polar Preet, Preet Chandi, coming to talk. We had Mitch Hutchcraft, who did the longest climb of Everest, and moving forward we'll have other speakers.
On Friday night we'll have Mountain Rescue there, so for me, it's all about community. I love coming up to Sheffield because I'm getting to know people. There is a great warmth in the North and I would just hope that a lot more people are kind of buzzy and chatting about Buffalo.
From the summit of Everest to the Outer Hebrides, Ben’s experiences have reinforced a simple idea: adventure doesn’t necessarily depend on how far you travel, but on how you choose to experience the world around you.
It’s an outlook that feels particularly fitting for Buffalo. More than 45 years after the company was founded in Sheffield, its focus remains on making purposeful outdoor clothing designed to work hard, last for years and accompany its wearer on adventures both large and small.
A huge thank you to Ben Fogle for taking the time to speak with us.
Buffalo Systems is now available at The Sporting Lodge.