Zander is a mechanical engineer with a heavy dose of business experience, but his main passion is designing and crafting. For all of his life, he has built starting with Legos, bricks and bikes. Zander has designed consumer, medical and commercial products. That transformed into building programs and teams, to build products and eventually into building his own company. "It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, but it was the most rewarding, fun, and downright amazing experience. " 

Zander learned the fundamentals of "lean" manufacturing at Stanford University, including a lengthy internship in Japan. That appreciation of manufacturing strategy influenced Zander and his partner Randy Hulett years later, when they designed an automatic machine to reinvent coffee. As with many entrepreneurial visionaries, they were quietly confident that they could change an industry. And then they actually did.

The machine created by this pairing, Clover, is now ubiquitous in higher-end Starbucks stores. After the acquisition by Starbucks, Zander continued learning, and continued creating.  Zander founded Kitsbow after years of riding in subpar, baggy, moto-inspired mountain bike gear. He hoped to change the scene by providing superior comfort using unparalleled quality materials, creating stylish gear that could be used for multiple pursuits on and off the bike. 

After his experience in Japan and with Clover and Starbucks, he knew that to succeed long term, the company would also have to create apparel in a new way. Apparel without long lead times, without limited and slow evolution of product, without the large order quantities, and without the inevitable compromises with sub par materials.

Above all, he wanted to eliminate waste. Engineers hate inefficiency, and mountain bikers love the environment and the outdoors. A visionary entrepreneur, trained as an engineer, Zander’s vision was to make clothes efficiently and with minimum waste and harm to the environment.  With all this experience under his belt, Zander is a welcome addition to the team!