Goalie equipment pioneer Mike Vaughn had no illusions of grandeur when he was growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and ‘80s.
He was a sturdy-if-unspectacular goaltender who understood that the professional game wasn’t in his future. At least not as a player.
“I played in the local area here, in the Great Lakes Junior League,” said Vaughn, now 54. “I knew I was just good enough to never go anywhere. As an amateur, I was about as good as you can get, in my prime. But that wasn’t good enough to take me anywhere else.”
Today, generations of goaltenders, at almost every conceivable level, are grateful for Vaughn’s keen sense of self-awareness. And for his innate interest in his gear. Four decades later, Vaughn Hockey remains a major influencer in the sport, particularly in the arena of goaltending equipment.
When he was 14, Vaughn spent his summer working so he could buy his gear. Within two years, he was tinkering with that equipment, replacing webbing in his catch glove, making adjustments to his leg pads.
“I started doing this more as a hobby,” he said. “I did a lot of repairs and modification to my own equipment, because back in the day, you know how archaic everything was. Nothing changed because there was no competition to make a change.”
Other players soon took notice.
“I had a lot of people ask me if I could do that modification to their gear. I’d do things like re-lace baseball gloves,” said Vaughn. “From playing, you knew how the puck reacted, and how injuries occurred, and all that stuff. After you fix so many stinky, smelly things, and you see certain products that always fail in certain areas, or always have a certain problem, it was at a point in time where I decided, ‘I’ve got enough stuff laying around here, I’m going to make my own gear from scratch.’ ”
So, about the time Vaughn was finishing high school, he launched his own business.
“Remember, it was 1981. There was no work anywhere,” he said. “Minimum wage in Michigan, I think, got up to $2.25 an hour. That was in February 1982, and you weren’t going to make more than minimum wage. That’s all you were going to find in a job.”
Gas got up to $1.70 a gallon that summer. Times were tough.
“I did a lot of things. I painted water towers. I work part time in a U-Haul place. I worked at a sports store. But I just found like I had a knack for doing this. So it just kind of grew from there.”
Vaughn was his first customer, and admits he wishes he kept better records of those early years. But at the time, he was far more concerned with simply making ends meet.
“Back then, you’re everything. You’re chief cook and bottle-washer,” he said. “You’re designing the parts, you’re cutting the parts out, you’re sewing them together, you’re assembling them, you’re stuffing that leg pad. I used Easter basket stuffing.
“Basically, when I started this, I was creating myself a job. Much like an independent electrical contractor or a plumber, they don’t really have a company. They’ve made themselves a nice job,” said Vaughn. “That’s how I started out, and over time, it grew. But one of the biggest reasons I was successful is that I had no idea what I was doing.”
Translation? Vaughn wasn’t beholden to preconceived notions about gear design and construction. In short, he was free to follow his own instincts and vision.
“Most of the companies, if you go back and find the people running the factories or how they did production — and I’ve been through all the different factories now as they’ve gone bankrupt or were sold, or the factories in Asia — and you find out that they all do things a certain way, which isn’t necessarily the best way,” said Vaughn. “It was the way they learned, or the way it used to be done at, say, the Cooper factory. And they just kept doing it that way, even though it wasn’t efficient, even it wasn’t the best way to ensure quality.
“When I started doing this, I had to figure out, OK, I have to go from making one to making 10 (pieces). Then I’m going from making 10 to making 100,” he said. “So we approached it in a common-sense, engineering way, as in, ‘What’s the most logical way to do this?’ And it’s funny, when you go back and look, some of these methods I see in manufacturing it’s so archaic it’s ridiculous. But it’s just because that company always did it that way.”
As a result, Vaughn revolutionized the goalie gear game. Self-taught, and armed only with his high school diploma, he began producing gear, head-to-toe, that soon drew the attention of top-flight goaltenders everywhere, employing cutting-edge techniques like Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) cutting.
“We haven’t been afraid to evolve and change things,” said Vaughn. “When there wasn’t much competition, and it was just Cooper, CCM and some of the old companies, they didn’t change things because they didn’t feel like they had to, and there was really no innovation in the hockey business.
“We came along, and started using lighter-weight materials that were stronger, more durable, until we get to where we are today, where the designs are completely different, and the materials are completely different.”
Whether it was because he played the position himself, or because he started the company that still bears his name, Vaughn said he’s always maintained a laser focus on the gear itself. He understands that marketing has an important role in retail, but it should never take priority over the company’s product.
“When you look at a company like Vaughn, we are the only privately-held hockey company left,” he said. “The rest are owned by large, corporate conglomerates or part of venture-capital groups. There’s no one with their name attached to the businesses. They take ridiculous risks. They don’t understand the marketplace and what it really is. And they continue to make the same mistakes year after year after year.
“Nobody is running these companies who has a vested interest in these companies, and I think that’s the real difference,” said Vaughn. “When we make decisions, I still remember being 14 years old, washing dishes at a restaurant all summer to buy a pair of pads. That’s the only way I was going to get them. And as expensive as things are, I still look back at that.”
Again, the emphasis needs to be on producing quality equipment that is lightweight, functional and durable.
“All of our competitors have pretty much become marketing companies. They’re no longer product companies,” he said. “My main, big competitors make even their high-end pro stuff offshore. And it’s really only equivalent to our next step down, which we import, but at only half the price. So where is all that money going to? It’s going to marketing. We’re a product company, first and foremost.”
Which is why, said Vaughn, many former Vaughn athletes leave the company after making it big. Some early Vaughn disciples, like former Boston Bruins goalie Andy Moog, current Bruins goalie coach Bob Essensa, stayed true to the brand. More recently, though, Vaughn has seen players leave due to the lure of sponsorship dollars.
“We keep about 40 percent” of NHL goalies as Vaughn athletes, he said. “If we get more than that, bigger companies start throwing money around, and it always seems to settle down (to that 40 percent). If you look at things like arm-and-chest pads and pants, and knee guards and cups, we have far more than that. Sometimes 60 percent.
“What’s not untypical is that a guy will wear our stuff as they’re coming up, and once he signs a couple of big contracts, he’ll switch to some other gear because they pay him a bunch of big money,” said Vaughn.
The obvious current example, he said, is Montreal’s Carey Price.
“To this day, he’s never played as well, statistically or number-wise,” said Vaughn. “Even though they’ve tried to copy our stuff exactly, he still hasn’t played as well. It’s two things — I think the equipment makes a little bit of difference, but the player changes.”
Of course, switching brands is nothing new.
“You look at a guy like (former Bruin) Byron Dafoe, who was playing on top of the world wearing our gear. He signed a big deal with another company, and wasn’t even playing within 12 months,” said Vaughn. “Or a guy like (former Canadien) Jose Theodore. He was on top of the world wearing Vaughn equipment, signed a with somebody else, (and was) completely gone out of the league in a couple of years.
“He actually came back here and begged us to make him gear again,” said Vaughn. “He said it affected him that much. He went on to have four or five more real good years, playing in Florida and in Minnesota. He made it back into the league.”
These days, due to the size of his company and the sheer number of customers, Vaughn doesn’t have the same one-on-one relationship with his top-flight goalies — like Boston’s Tuukka Rask and Jonathan Quick (Hamden, Conn.) of the L.A. Kings — as he did in the past.
But his unparalleled commitment to his craft remains.
“Being a goalie myself — and I keep up on trends and everything — you look at guys who are trying to do things in their equipment that they cannot do. So a lot of it, we design equipment that would do those things that would allow the technique to change. It’s allowed there to be more strategy in the way to position is played.
“In sports, there’s a lot of fluff and marketing to it, instead of substance,” said Vaughn. “We think of it more as product. I can tell you that a lot of companies have designers that are graphic artists. They’re not goalies. And even some of the companies who have goalies working in their sales (departments) really aren’t equipment designers. You can’t design a piece of goalie equipment, and do it right, until you have a puck come at you at 100 miles an hour. That’s the difference.”
