The sport of Ultimate is taking on a new corporate face, and the president of Vancouver-based manufacturing firm Gaia Ultimate Sports Inc. says the sky is the only limit.

"I started this business six years ago in my condo," Brett Price says. "And we are now in an 8,000-sq.-ft. office with sales worldwide."

Invented in the late 1960s as a combination of football, basketball and soccer and played with a Frisbee disc, Ultimate continues to be one of the fastest growing sports in the world, proponents say.

A kind of collective consciousness on behalf of the players - or perhaps a fear that big money will spoil the sport - keeps it low-key. According to The Ultimate Handbook, the sport is now played in 42 countries, including government-sponsored leagues in Sweden, Norway and Japan. Ultimate became a medal sport in Japan's 2001 World Games.

Karen Dyer, Business Edge
Gaia president Brett Price says his company is interested in catering to the grassroots aspect of the fast-growing sport.

"Ultimate in Canada is a bit of an anomaly because it's organized here in these enormous mega-leagues," says Price, during an interview in his jersey-packed office last week.

"In Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, they have the largest sports league of any sport in those major centres - Winnipeg would be up there too, as they are up around 180 teams now. This is different than the soccer leagues where the leagues tend to be smaller and more local."

Gaia, named for the mythological goddess of Mother Earth, had its origins in a case of restless feet.

"I'd moved here from Ontario to go to UBC," Price says, "and I was in the Ernst and Young chartered accountancy program, but it was killing me - absolutely killing me."

In 1997, a chance game of Ultimate with friends captured his competitive instinct and sent him onto a whole new playing field.

Shortly afterward, Price decided to take a flyer on the world of chartered accountancy and formed Gaia with a partner, Matthew Creelman.

Price's epiphany coincided with the second wave of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1998. Prior to his exposure to Ultimate, he had toyed with the idea of importing kids' shoes from Mexico, but something about the Ultimate connection just clicked.

"Everyone was arguing - should we wear baseball cleats, or soccer cleats to play the game?" So Price and Creelman decided to solve the problem by producing their own footwear. With newly relaxed trade restrictions, they made their first contacts with athletic shoe manufacturers in Mexico.

As a startup endeavour, Gaia had its share of problems, with Price losing his first $10,000 investment to an unscrupulous supplier in Mexico. But he and Creelman persevered and their second try was luckier. They established a relationship with a company that continues to manufacture footwear for Gaia today.

The product line quickly expanded to include jerseys and shorts, and now the company is set to begin wholesale sales by 2006.

"We started Gaia in the dot-com era when the Internet was going to save the world, so we focused 100 per cent on Internet distribution," says Price.

They kept their eye on the grassroots of the sport - distributing to individuals, teams, tournaments and leagues. Custom jerseys came about with the advent of a build your own gear (BYOG) program.

A click on the website will allow an individual or team to generate a custom jersey, with every detail right down to the location of the logo left up to the choice of the buyer.

"The cool thing is, we have such a tight relationship with our suppliers that they can pull the order right off the Internet and put it together - just like a McDonald's line," says Price. "And that's something that you wouldn't get by going the wholesale route. With the Internet, we deliver in four weeks - custom product."

Though the Internet has meant that Gaia sells its product in places as far flung as Finland, Japan and Colombia, Price still heads out to tournaments to display and sell his gear onsite to the players. Much like the poorly kept secret of Ultimate, news about Gaia's product line is spread by word of mouth.

"We do almost no advertising," Price says. "But we show up everywhere. Gaia has been the major product sponsor at the last four world championships. We have portable stores and we do between 30 and 50 tournaments a year."

North America still makes up the bulk of Gaia's market with more than $1 million dollars in sales yearly, but Price predicts that this year Gaia will do sales approaching $400,000 in Europe and up to $150,000 in Japan. "Starting this year, we've found joint-venture partners in Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand," Price says.

Over the years, Gaia's Ion-series Ultimate cleat has evolved from a product that differed little from a conventional soccer cleat into footwear that is more specifically designed for the sport. Gaia's new shoe, the G-4 Multi, eschews the cardboard insole that is typical of today's most popular football boots and has replaced it with a surlyn insert more commonly found in motocross boots (or on the cover of golf balls).

The surlyn adds a level of durability with the added bonus of being lighter and stronger. Gaia now test-drives its cleats on the hard-working feet of world champion Vancouver Ultimate team, Furious George.

Hoping to tap into the crossover success of other sports apparel companies such as Sugoi and LuluLemon, Price is also trying to raise the profile of his company in the sporting environment outside the Ultimate world.

"Gaia is fundamentally a company that sells Ultimate gear," he says, "but our gear can be used in other sports as well. Ultimate is kind of a mix of a lot of different sports and people who do a lot of different sports like our gear. People use our shirts and shorts for running and stuff like wrist-bands just because they're in style."

The Gaia line now includes baseball caps, visors, toques, rain ponchos, water bottles, bags and backpacks with special disc holders, and a new weather suit for wind and rain.

Price has since bought out Creelman but continues to be an avid player of the sport around which he has built his company.

(Karen Dyer can be reached at karen@businessedge.ca)