Editor’s note: Core Careers is a series that gets behind the scenes of brands to share the stories of the people working there.
Arc’teryx’s Cam Stuart first started understanding the body and its limitations as he chased a professional skiing as a teenager through injuries, training, and nutrition.
But as most of his ski friends went on to coaching or broadcasting, Stuart headed to the University of British Columbia (UBC) to pursue a bachelor’s in applied sciences with a biomedical mechanical engineering degree. There, he started to explore how he could combine his identity as a mountain athlete with engineering to help the body be more resilient and prevent injury. He discovered where he wanted to take his career next.
“As soon as I got to university and realized that that was a career path, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s spot on,’” Stuart said in an interview with SESO.
As a master’s student at UBC, Stuart studied injury biomechanics and focused on helmet design.
“Being able to tie head injury and concussions to a piece of sporting equipment that can help prevent those injuries was kind of the light bulb moment for me into how engineering can support athletes,” Stuart said.
After he graduated, a supervisor introduced Stuart to Tom Fayle, a longtime Arc’teryx veteran and the director of Advanced R&D.
“When I started that conversation with Arc’teryx, they didn’t have someone with my expertise in a design capacity,” Stuart said. “It was a lot of throwing a whole bunch of ideas at the wall about how I could support their process and to see what sticks. And it kind of blossomed from there.”
Now in his eighth year at Arc’teryx, first as a design engineer and now leading the research and engineering team in the R&D-focused Advanced Concepts group, Stuart is showing off Arc’teryx’s latest invention: MO/GO pants, a motorized exoskeleton pant that’s designed to help hikers ascend hills by giving their legs a boost.
Advanced Concepts at Arc’teryx
Stuart was initially brought on to support climbing harness design. While it’s there to support the load of the human body, it also needs to be comfortable.
While he manages the research and engineering arm within the Advanced Concepts group, Stuart’s expertise also supports the six or seven priorities the overall group is working on at any given time. The team has physiology experts who can weigh in on things like thermal regulation, he said. Mechanical engineers build custom test rigs and put product through the same level of rigor it would go through out in the field. And design engineers create technical product for specific use cases.
“Everybody’s always coming at the problems that we face in the outdoors differently and see different opportunities,” Stuart said. “We get a great opportunity to explore, to look at different ideas – just to iterate and fail.”

The inner workings of Arc’teryx’s MO/GO pants. Photo by Mike Withers for SESO.
The Advanced Concepts team reframes failure by looking at each iteration of a project in terms of whether it works or doesn’t work. When it doesn’t, the team simply tries something else. It has succeeded when it solves a problem, Stuart said, such as the Micon Litric avalanche airbag – something that Stuart didn’t directly work on, but that he said elicited the same kind of emotional response he’s been witnessing with the MO/GO pants.
“I’m a big back country skier, and I’ve used a bunch of different electronic airbags, and they just really didn’t meet the need,” he said. “I found myself trying to find a specific day that I could use my avalanche airbag pack. When I first got to test our electronic pack, I was yelling from the rooftops. I couldn’t have been more proud.”
Taking the MO/GO Pants for a Spin
That same “ah-ha” moment is coming from users during test runs of the MO/GO pants over the past few months, Stuart said – and I got to experience one for myself. Designed in conjunction with Skip, Stuart and Director of Brand Communications Marion Young fitted me in the pants just before Christmas and took me up a trail near Arc’teryx’s North Vancouver headquarters.
The pants have a frame built within them that’s designed to apply force to three different parts of the body. Adjustable cuffs go around the thigh, below the knee and the ankle, and they’re made from materials that are easily cleaned and maintained through extreme temperatures, moisture, and other elements. Once the user is at the trail head, they can clip on a motor attachment that powers the pants and supplies the assistive movement to support the hiker up the hill.
I sent my measurements ahead of time, so the pants were rigged up and ready for me to try on. They’re remarkably comfortable and it’s not immediately obvious that one is wearing pants with a hard shell cuff within them – they almost look like regular hiking pants.

On the trail in Deep Cove, British Columbia. Photo by Mike Withers for SESO.
At the trail head in beautiful Deep Cove, we caught a sunny, warm day for December, but it had been raining consistently, so water flowed like a shallow creek down the steps of the well-used trail. Stuart snapped the motorized attachment to each side of the pants and showed me how to turn it on and choose which level of strength I wanted.
At first, it was exciting to feel the power of the motor and the slight resistance of the attachment. Machine learning technology developed by Skip helps the pants anticipate the user’s next step, and then help them along to take that step. But at first, rather than feeling assisted, it felt a bit like the MO/GO pants could trip me up. But Stuart made some adjustments to the fit of the cuffs in the pants, and walking up and down the stairs after that became easier – something that was especially noticeable when Stuart would turn the pants off to show me how much of a difference it made. I immediately felt heavier and taking a step became more difficult.
During test runs at the Chief in Squamish, some users were overcome with emotion, rejoicing that they could make it up the famously steep climb after believing their hiking days were over due to sore knees or other mobility issues. So far, approximately 1,000 people have pre-ordered the MO/GO pants, which sell for $5,000 each. Because hiking is so popular, but can become more difficult as people age, the pants aim to help hikers return to something they love.
This year, Arc’teryx will likely implement some design tweaks and then figure out how to bring the MO/GO pants to market.
“It was about validating the concept and really getting it out in the world, and screaming from the rooftops about it,” Stuart said. “Now the work is a bit of a redesign and figuring out how we actually bring it to the market.”
Kate Robertson can be reached at kate@shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com.