Videos

In this video, Bo and Petra Hilleberg talk about the early days of Hilleberg, and how Bo designed and tested early concepts of the company’s tents. He relates how his experience in the Swedish military led him to pioneer some of our current designs, and he recounts some funny stories about the trial and error that went into creating the “perfect” Hilleberg tent.

Petra and Bo Hilleberg talk about how Petra came to start Hilleberg, Inc., the company's US-based division that is responsible for all sales outside of Europe. Their chat covers how Petra literally grew up in tents, her early tent trips, both with her parents and on her own, her early determination to start the Hilleberg US office, and her success at doing so.

With this video, “Hilleberg – since 1971,” we want to share our 4+ decades of making and using tents. Our founder, Bo Hilleberg, is an avid, lifelong outdoorsman, and before founding Hilleberg he served as a soldier, trained and worked as a forester, and spent as much time in the backcountry as he could. When he started making tents in the early 70s, he was simply trying to make something that worked better for his own outdoor adventures. But in doing so, he and his wife (and business partner) created a long-lasting company with a dedicated hands-on approach that is equal parts old-school craftsmanship and technical innovation. In the beginning, Bo did the design and sales work, and Renate ran the production and made all prototypes. Today, we have over 60 employees in three facilities in three different countries, and we make nearly 40 different tent models. We still make our tents in Europe, and we are still proudly a small family company. Bo is Chairman, and is very involved with design and development; daughter Petra is CEO of the Hilleberg Group and also handles all company business outside of Europe; and Bo, Renate, Petra and her brother Rolf make up the governing board of directors.

Hilleberg the Tentmaker’s headquarters is in the town of Frösön, in northern Sweden. We do the majority of our product development here, and also test our materials and tents in the lab, our wind machine, and out in the field. All European tent sales and customer service are handled here, as well.

To ensure that we can build the tents we envision, and do so at the level of quality we demand, we own and operate our own, ISO-9001: 2014 certified, manufacturing facility in Rapla, Estonia.
We also work with a few, carefully selected Estonian factories, where sewers trained by us work exclusively on Hilleberg tents. Our Rapla facility is the hub for all our manufacturing, and it provides us with full quality control oversight of all of our production, and allows us to quickly and seamlessly adopt any design improvement we create.

Hilleberg the Tentmaker's U.S. office is located in Redmond Washington. Here we produce our catalog, social media, advertising, videos, and website. The U.S. office also handles all sales and customer service outside of Europe.

At Hilleberg, we work very hard to build our tents so that they will last a long time, and stand up to hard use, and we have done so since we started making tents 50 years ago. We chose the best materials we can find, we design and prototype our tents in house, we test our tents extensively both in the field and in the lab, and we make our tents in Europe. We are also committed to increasing the longevity of our tents by being able to repair what we make.
In both our Swedish and US offices, we have repair specialists who can – and do – repair tents clawed by bears, eaten by mice, gored by reindeer, even crushed by seals. They excel at taking a well-used, well-loved, 20-year-old tent, being able to repair nearly anything, and returning to the customer a fully functional tent that will last another 20 years.

At our Hilleberg Outdoor Academy, we host a selection of our retail partners for a multiday backcountry trip into the mountains of Jämtland, in northern Sweden, a short distance from our company headquarters. At these training seminars, which we run a few times a year, retailers both learn about us, and spend a few days in the Swedish mountains getting hands-on experience using our tents. The Hilleberg Outdoor Academy is a vital part of our relationship with our retailers, as it strengthens our partnerships with them, as well as ensuring that they have deep, real-life knowledge of our tents.

We created our Hilleberg Outdoor Academy to offer our retail partners hands-on, real-world training with our tents, and how they work in all conditions. We run the Academy twice a year, giving staff from our retailers a chance to spend a few days and nights hiking or skiing in the northern Swedish mountains. They get to try different tents, and to learn about their design as well as more about Hilleberg in general. We get the opportunity to learn more about our partners, and to build great relationships. Our most recent Academy was a multi-day ski tour, in very cold temperatures, where the participants got to use the tents in conditions that ranged from clear and sunny to blizzard.

Designing a great tent is one thing, but manufacturing it is another. The hub of our production process is our own Estonian facility, where we sew, set up, inspect, and approve the tents before they are shipped. In this video Petra Hilleberg takes you on a quick tour of our main tent factory in Rapla Estonia.

Every one of our Tent Handbooks come with a tear strength testing sheet. Order your free copy today and see for yourself how the tear strength of our Kerlon outer tent fabrics means not only a longer life for your tent but also provides welcome “trip insurance” when the weather turns wild. catalog.hilleberg.com

Greater strength equals greater safety. It is that simple. The stronger the fabric on your outer tent is, the less likely it is to tear because of bad weather, rough handling, or inadvertent mistakes.

Our Kerlon fabrics are coated, on both sides, with a total of three layers of 100 percent silicone. Certainly, they are completely waterproof and very light, but our process also imparts a strength to the base material that is an order of magnitude greater than is possible with the more common polyurethane coating. Perhaps more importantly, our coated Kerlon fabrics are also far, far stronger than so-called “siliconized” materials, which typically employ a coating mixture of silicone and other compounds.

This means that we can start with lighter weight base fabrics and still produce outer tent materials that are stronger overall, and, in the case of Kerlon 1800, 1200 and 2500, that are stronger than a great many of the so-called “expedition grade,” heavy duty tent materials on the market (even our lighter Kerlon 1000 fabric is more robust than many of those fabrics). The result: if your outer tent does suffer a puncture, our high tear strengths make it far less likely that the puncture will develop into a trip-ending rip.

For 2021, Hilleberg is introducing three new tents – the Helags 2 and 3 in the Yellow Label series and the Black Label Soulo BL.

The Helags, available in a two- and a three-person version, is the Yellow Label counterpart to the Black Label Keron and the Red Label Kaitum. With two vestibules and very roomy interiors, the Helags models are excellent tents for any snow-free adventure, and both are impressively lightweight: 2.4 kg/5 lbs 5 oz packed weight for the Helags 2 and 2.6 kg/5lbs 12 oz for the Helags 3.

The new Soulo BL is the Black Label version of the Red Label Soulo one-person tent. It has the same surprisingly roomy, fully freestanding construction with integrated vestibule as the original, but features Black Label materials – Kerlon 1800 outer tent fabric and 10 mm poles – for even greater strength. It has a packed weight of 2.8 kg/ 6 lbs 3 oz, just 400 g/14 oz more than the Red Label version.

Hilleberg is also introducing new Mesh Inner Tents that will fit into both the new Helags 2 and 3 and the Red Label Kaitum 2 and 3, as well as a new accessory peg, the Y-Peg XL, with a three-finned cross section and a 24 cm/9.4 in length for added holding power in both hard and soft ground.