Even if I wasn’t a business writer, I would feel compelled to take notes when Peter van Delft tells a story. Peter’s the co-owner of Wild Coast Camping Gear, a leading Nova Scotia-based innovator and retailer of rooftop tents, but more than that he embodies Ethiopian jazz musician and arranger Mulatu Astatke’s “Yèkèrmo Sèw” (a man of experience and wisdom). When he spoke to Spotlight on Business in early June, I found myself hurriedly and methodically jotting down notes in the margins of my legal pad like I did as an eager first-year history student at King’s College. There are several moments in the recorded phone conversation where I – confessedly unprofessionally – am heard over a background of two-way silence scratching pen on paper before acknowledging Peter’s latest answers and anecdotes and transitioning into the following question. There’s a fireside effect to his Dutch accent and storyteller’s inflections that just can’t be denied. “The term ‘wild coast’ originates from South Africa and it refers to the Indian Ocean,” he began. “My wife, Trish is from South Africa. She grew up in the bush, actually. It was so remote that their mail was dropped out of a Sesna. Her father was a trader; he had a trading post. He traded finished products and goods to locals who would trade for sheep’s wool and then he would take that to market. That’s actually where we saw our first rooftop tent, in South Africa.”
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JUNE 2018
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