Jake Lah - The Story Behind Lightweight Outdoor Furniture
Jake Lah founded DAC, the company behind the world's best aluminum tent poles. This is the story of how his life's work became Helinox, and why it started with people, not products.
Most people who own a Helinox product don't know his name. Jake Lah is the founder of DAC — the company whose high-strength aluminum tent poles are inside the shelters made by The North Face, MSR, Big Agnes, and Hilleberg. If you've slept in a serious outdoor tent, you've likely slept inside his engineering. But the story starts long before DAC. And it starts with his mother.
She was one of the pioneers of the Girl Scouts in Korea. Every summer, the campsites filled with troops from different schools — a week at a time, one group leaving as the next arrived. Jake grew up in the middle of all of it. Sleeping in tents. Moving around the campsite. Living outside. "It became a natural part of who I am."
He went on to study history and business — no engineering, no design. But he carried one very specific ambition: to build something world-class with Korean hands. When he discovered that a single company dominated the global market for high-strength aluminum tubing, his reaction wasn't discouragement. "I thought — that's exactly it."
What followed was thirty-six years of a single question, asked in different forms. In the 1990s, the answer was family tents — steel-framed, house-shaped, thirty to forty kilograms. Make them lighter. In the late '90s, it was backpackers squeezing toothpaste out of tubes before a trip to save a few grams. Make the poles lighter still. The Featherlite pole came from that obsession — and behind it, DAC became the tent pole supplier the outdoor world trusted. All the while, his son was watching. Young Lah grew up seeing his father sketch tents during church sermons. During meals. During films at home. The obsession was quiet but total. What stayed with Young wasn't just the engineering — it was the habit of asking why things had to be the way they were.
The third question arrived in Moab, Utah. A friend — Mike Scherer, one of the most respected tent designers in the United States — insisted on dragging two large outdoor chairs into the desert. Jake asked why. The answer: "You'll see." He saw. Sitting outside with nothing but landscape in every direction, in a real chair — something that had always seemed obvious suddenly was. Discomfort had always felt like the price of going outside. That was just the outdoors. That was the deal. It wasn't. "In the end, people want comfort. So — can we make it lightweight?" That question, asked with the same logic that had shaped thirty years of pole development, became Helinox. And it was Young who built it — taking the engineering his father had spent a lifetime developing, and carrying it somewhere new. A portable camping chair weighing less than a kilogram. A brand that moved from mountain trails to design fairs in Paris, from basecamp to Louis Vuitton. Two generations. One question, still being asked.
