“Hailing from the west coast of Canada, in the rainy city of Vancouver, our story began with the ambition to develop the smallest, most portable everyday umbrella while retaining strength. Ideally, a product small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, yet sturdy enough to last season after season. However, this proved to be more troublesome than we imagined. Umbrellas haven’t really changed at all for the past century. The mechanisms still remain the same in how they’re built and how they operate. There were tweaks here and there, whether changing the profile of the members or changing the materials to improve size and strength. After countless weeks of trying to design a smaller umbrella to compete with others, we started realizing why small umbrellas were all constructed the same: every shortcut is taken to reduce that final size and weight. If we were to compromise strength for size, it would be yet another product with a short life span. So we decided that while we can’t make the smallest umbrella, we can most definitely make the strongest and most durable umbrella”. [Via.](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cypress-umbrella#/)