A family that never lost its way

Like parents, like son. To trace the origins of Polaar is to retrace the rich history of an unusual family of travelers. Presentation.

It all starts with a simple idea: transmission. It's the invisible foundation that has always held families together. In this respect, the Kurbiel family is no exception - quite the contrary.

While the essence of Polaar, its philosophy and the brand's values were born in the mind of Daniel, its founder, it seems important to point out that it was probably his parents who laid the first stone, already very white, of a project as ambitious as it is snowy.

It was they who undertook the first voyages to the Arctic. First to Iceland, in 1976, where the island's frozen shores were explored aboard an imposing icebreaker named Le Vagabond.

This first polar odyssey acted as a revelation: it was while surveying this unfamiliar and seemingly unfathomable region that the explorer couple realized they were intrigued and fascinated by the Far North.

Expeditions have followed one another ever since. In 1978, for example, the record for the most northerly voyage was broken off Greenland. The following year, they even mapped the unexplored Blosville region from the deck of Vagabond 2.

1982 will remain an unforgettable memory. In the company of Nicolas Hulot, they managed to pinpoint the exact location of the North Magnetic Pole after parachuting into the middle of an ice floe.

At that precise moment, the explorations were not driven by any research logic, which would later shape part of the brand's identity, but rather by a marked desire to push back the frontiers of the continent and set new records.

Nevertheless, a first frosty furrow had been traced. The same one that Daniel would follow a few years later...