The route traveled on a legendary backpacking trip. Grandma and Grandpa’s woodlot. The lake where two lovebirds first met.
Where our most cherished moments happen, their physical geography, plays a powerful role in our memories of them. This place-based dimension of life’s high points is the driving force behind Vermont-based Treeline Terrains, where founders Jacob Freedman, Alex Gemme, and Nathaniel Klein have built a humming business. Using locally sourced wood, geographic information systems (GIS) technology, and a combination of precision machinery and finetuned handiwork, Treeline Terrains creates 3D topographical maps of landscapes their customers in Vermont and beyond hold dear.
A Special Place, a Cherished Mentor
Fittingly, Treeline Terrains originated in a place of great shared meaning to its founders. Freedman, Gemme, and Klein attended Middlebury College together, graduating in 2021. All three taught ski lessons at Middlebury Snowbowl. Their time at the ski area provided the inspiration for their first map.
During their sophomore year at Middlebury, the three friends grew close to Daphne Diego, their manager at the Snowbowl. She encouraged the trio as they created a Lesson Fund to assist Middlebury College students who wanted to learn to ski but could not afford lessons. “She gave us the full support and validation to say, ‘This is a valuable thing,’” Freedman said. “She supported us through the whole process.”
The program was a resounding success (according to Freedman, it is now written into Middlebury’s annual Snowbowl budget), and the three students wanted to show their appreciation for Diego’s mentorship. Freedman, a geography major who was familiar with 3D maps, suggested that they create one of the Snowbowl. Klein had carpentry experience from time spent with his grandfather, a general contractor. Gemme was familiar with the college’s “makerspace,” which housed a small computer numerical control (CNC) router. The three friends scavenged materials for the map from the campus woodshop.
“We were picking out random pieces of wood in the woodshop simply based on what looked good,” Freedman said. “We experimented with different pieces to get a snowcapped peak effect.”
Freedman admits that the first 6-by-6-by-4-inch Snowbowl replica was a mere glimmer of the maps Treeline Terrains produces now. “Quite frankly, it didn’t really look like the Snowbowl,” he recalled, laughing. “People said it looked like a piece of fudge. It looked much more mountainous than the Snowbowl really is. And it didn’t have any trails.”
Still, Diego was delighted by the gift. She displayed it prominently and, Freedman said, soon had to Velcro the map to her desk to keep people from taking it. Through the rest of sophomore year and into their junior year, they continued using the Middlebury makerspace in their spare time to produce a few more Snowbowl maps for community auctions and as gifts for other ski instructors who were retiring. They also made a map of several of the Adirondack High Peaks for a Middlebury art show.
Despite the early acclaim for those first maps, Freedman, Klein, and Gemme had no intention of founding a mapmaking business. “It was just fun,” Freedman said. “At that point, it was just cool that we could make something so meaningful to someone.” He was focused on his geography and environmental studies courses, while Gemme and Klein were both on a premed track.
But as Middlebury students and community members heard about the maps and the compliments rolled in, the three friends started thinking: Could they start a business centered on their maps? For Freedman, the positive response reawakened an aspiration. “When I was a kid, my brother and I sold marshmallow blasters made of PVC piping to raise money to buy an Xbox,” he said. “We went to one art fair and made more money than we expected to. That early experience planted the seed in my head that starting a business was something I eventually wanted to do.”
Then, during their junior year, the pandemic closed the Middlebury campus. The disruption – and the free time at home – pushed Freedman, Klein, and Gemme to begin laying the groundwork for a bona fide 3D map business. They put out feelers via social media and alumni organizations to measure interest in such a venture and began lining up orders. They also applied for a $3,000 grant from the college, which they were awarded that summer, to support the nascent enterprise.
When they returned to campus in the fall of 2020 for their senior year, however, the makerspace was closed, which meant they no longer had access to the CNC router. Determined not to let the setback derail their plans, they enrolled the following spring in a business management class at Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET) and purchased their own CNC router using the grant award and $500 of personal funds from each founder. They also developed a relationship with The A. Johnson Co. of Bristol, Vermont, which would supply the lumber used for their maps until the mill’s closing in late 2023.
Klein, Gemme, and Freedman set up their first dedicated shop in a friend’s barn 10 minutes away from campus and began fulfilling orders with their new router. The debut map they made in the temporary space, commissioned by one of their business advisors at VCET, depicted Alta Ski Area in Utah. Another, requested by a friend of a friend’s parent, was a map of Vermont’s Pico Mountain Resort. Funded by a $1,500 community grant, they also created a 3D map installation for the headquarters of the Middlebury Area Land Trust portraying the town of Middlebury’s public hiking trails. They later donated the map to the organization.
Seemingly all of a sudden, the three friends were running a business. As part of their VCET course, they had polled friends and family members on potential names, with possibilities including “Middlebury Mountainscapes” and “Rugged Ridges.” “Treeline Terrains” came out on top. They launched a website and incorporated an LLC in Vermont under the new name. These steps – plus the pipeline of revenue they had generated through those early orders – allowed them to focus full time on the business once they graduated in the spring of 2021.
Freedman summarized their collective attitude at that transitional moment: “Let’s do this.”
From College Students to Professional Mapmakers
In a New England riff on the “scrappy startup,” the three new graduates set up their first post-college workshop in a humble locale: the Groton, Massachusetts, basement of Klein’s grandfather, a general contractor. He and his neighbors lent the entrepreneurs tools as they worked to acquire equipment of their own.
Amid the excitement of completing their first orders as a legitimate business, Freedman, Gemme, and Klein began asking themselves big questions about the future. Central among those questions: What – and where – was their core market?
They decided to focus on the state that had brought them together. They had incorporated the business in Vermont, maintained a customer base there, and their time at Middlebury suggested that their product was particularly alluring in a state where people cherish their local landscapes.
Their Middlebury connections served the founders well in their relocation quest. After the trio gave a talk at the college about their entrepreneurship journey, Pam Berenbaum, director of the school’s Global Health program, and her partner Scott Barkdoll offered them a space in Barkdoll’s workshop, where he builds wooden canoes. Treeline Terrains remained in that space until June 2022. After a brief stint in Bristol, the company moved in April 2023 to its current headquarters: a 5,000-square-foot facility in Monkton, about 20 miles from Middlebury.
Treeline Terrains now fulfills upward of 2,500 orders annually (compared to about 200 in 2021), boasts five CNC routers and a laser engraver, and employs up to a dozen staffers, depending on the season. These include high school and college students as well as software developers, and they help with tasks from the manufacturing process to social media promotion.
To spread the word about their business, Klein, Gemme, and Freedman have taken their maps on the road to various trade shows and fairs, including most recently to the annual Eastern States Expedition – the “Big E” – where enterprises from across the six New England states present their products to more than 1.6 million shoppers. Treeline Terrains now offers full-size maps, as well as keychains and ornaments, for sale in 25 stores across New England.
How a Treeline Terrains Map Is Made
Conversations with customers at trade shows and other venues have inspired the company to expand its stock map offerings from ski areas in the Northeast to all 50 states and landscapes across the country, with a particular focus on iconic lakes. But the majority of Treeline Terrains’ sales are custom maps.
Using a two-dimensional rendering of the globe on the company’s website, customers may select the specific area they want mapped, then review a 3D preview of the map. Treeline Terrains can then create the custom map as a wall hanging, tabletop piece, or cribbage board in sizes from 6-by-8 inches to as large as 18-by-24 inches.
Klein oversees the manufacturing process, from selecting the wood to building the walnut frames that house the maps. He planes maple and cherry boards into thin layers and glues these together to create a laminate. The compilation of different woods creates an appealing color combination meant to simulate the gradient in tree species one sees when looking at a mountainside. Klein, or one of the staff members who work with him in the shop, then feeds the glued boards into the CNC router to produce a “rough cut” of the map. “It’s kind of like 3D printing in reverse: cutting away material, rather than building it,” Freedman said.
From there, team members add finishing touches, including detailed sanding, linseed-oil application, and – for some custom orders – a personalized engraving. The crew also adds a blue epoxy resin for bodies of water on some maps.
Vermont-Rooted Success
In a sign of their growing repute, Treeline Terrains now receives international and corporate orders. They recently fulfilled a request for 60 wooden trays for a coffee company in Canada. And after creating a custom map of a lake in Italy, they received several orders in Italian.
Despite branching out to geographies far beyond Vermont, however, the Green Mountain State remains at the core of the company’s success. It’s where they still source most of their wood, and continues to be their customer base. “We sell maps to people all over the country, in all 50 states,” he said. “But very often, saying you’re ‘Vermont-made’ means more to people than ‘locally made.’ The Vermont brand is very strong.”
That attention to both materials and place helps Treeline Terrains create pieces that are at once standalone works of art and one-of-a-kind mementos. The company recently created a topographical urn cover for a couple to whom one section of Vermont’s Green Mountains is particularly dear. “It’s something that will be a part of their family forever,” Freedman said. “We’re helping to take someone’s story and turn it into a physical thing.”