Garrett Finney, Founder, Cricket Trailer

As an accomplished residential and commercial architect, professor, lecturer, blacksmith, and industrial designer, Garrett Finney had long been fascinated with small environments, especially ones where the rituals of daily life feel more directly connected to the outside world. And then in 1999, he moved to Houston to work at NASA’s International Space Station. His mission: to revamp their “habitation module” (the place where astronauts eat, sleep, bathe, and relax). It was exciting, but he wanted to design things that would actually get built in his lifetime. He returned to Earth, not sure what would follow.

Life went on. He got married. He had kids. He wanted to share his longstanding love of camping with this family. However, the annual kindergarten campout demonstrated that camping with small children in a tent was not what he (or rather, his wife) had dreamed of. So, he combined his NASA experience with his love of the outdoors and created a lightweight, compact, and flexible environment in which to travel and explore the world.

The result is Cricket.