By Joel Crabtree
Photos by Kody Theriault
From our January 2025 issue
On a camping trip in 1979, Ted and Laura Sweeney, a Massachusetts couple, fell in love with Acadia National Park. A year later, they started a business, Tempshield Cryo-Protection, making gloves that could shield laboratory workers’ hands from temperatures several hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Not coincidentally, they decided to set up their production facility in Trenton, just outside Acadia. Tempshield’s gloves became a success, especially with the pharmaceutical industry, which requires regular handling of liquid nitrogen (other clients have included NASA, the CDC, and NATO). But the gloves didn’t go entirely unnoticed in the outside world either. “We had people who approached us over the years who bought cryo gloves to snow-blow with,” chief operating officer Paul LaRochelle says.
After Jim Woldenberg bought Tempshield, in 2018, he began pushing the idea of using in-house expertise to develop a consumer-facing line of winter handwear, and three years later, the company launched its new mittens, Mainers. Each year, the lineup has grown: new color schemes and styles, gloves, and varying levels of insulation and water resistance for different types of activities.
“Every hand, every person is different,” LaRochelle says. “Some skiers travel with two or three pairs of handwear. I know, being a snowmobiler, if I’m way up north and it’s after dark and it’s 20 below, I’m gonna need an all-leather, wind-resistant, good insulation package.”
The company has been naming its various mittens and gloves after locations around the state. The Portland, for instance, is an all-purpose, walk-around-town mitten suited to cold-but-not-too-cold days, whereas the Bethel is a glove built for wearing for long periods of time in colder weather, perhaps on the slopes at Sunday River. Depending on the model, inner layers consist of Gore-Tex, recycled synthetic insulation, or wool, while outers come in performance textiles, waxed canvas, or leather. Laser-cutting and die-cutting machines turn the materials into palms, thumbs, and digits in a 10,000-square-foot building formerly used for boat storage. Then, they’re sent across the street to Tempshield’s main facility, where a team of stitchers puts all the constituent parts together.
Steve Heckman, who works on the assembly line, takes satisfaction in seeing the care put into cryo gloves applied to winter gear as well (Heckman seems drawn to jobs that pertain to extreme temperatures — he also serves as chief of Trenton’s volunteer fire department). “We’re taking a lot of that and just incorporating it into the apparel side of things,” he says. “The consumer benefits because the machines are the same, the people are the same, the quality-control process is the same.”
On the Mainers website, there are clips of someone sticking a mittened hand in an ice bath and of someone doing pull-ups on mittens tethered to the ceiling. The makers of those mittens seem to grasp that — up on the slopes, out on the ice, back on the trails — Mainers (the people, not the product) have a habit of putting their winter gear through the ringer.
From our special “Winter Wonder” feature, our guide to the people, places, gear, and more making it possible to have an amazing Maine winter. Find a few “Winter Wonder” stories here on the website, and pick up a copy of our January 2025 issue to read them all!
