Were You Born in a Barn?
Some of the outdoor industry’s biggest brands were born in basements and spare rooms in small mountain and river towns most people in Manhattan have never heard of.
Their rural address wasn't a handicap — it was their secret sauce.
In 1989, a river guide named Mark Paigen got tired of soggy tennis shoes on the Gunnison Gorge. He moved to Paonia, Colorado — a town of 1,600 people in the North Fork Valley, best known for peaches and coal — and started making sandals in a spare room of his house. His first sale was to a client on a three-day float. He traced the guy’s feet on paper and charged him $30. By the time Chaco was acquired by Wolverine Worldwide in 2009, it had grown to 145 employees and was producing 320,000 pairs a year out of a factory that paid people to ride their bikes to work and quit smoking.1
That’s not an accident of geography. That’s geography as thesis.
In 1994, two ski instructors named Peter and Patty Duke got cold feet. Literally. After years on the slopes in Steamboat Springs, they’d had enough of wool that scratched and synthetic socks that smelled. They started making merino ski socks out of their basement, decorated with penguins, using New Zealand wool that nobody in the outdoor market had thought to apply to performance. Smartwool sold to Timberland in 2005 for $82 million.2 VF Corporation bought Timberland — and with it Smartwool — for $2.2 billion in 2011.3 Two ski instructors. A basement. A problem anyone who’s ever skied a powder day in cotton socks immediately recognized.
Around the same time, a California entrepreneur named Gary Hammerslag moved back to Steamboat after selling a medical device company. He took up snowboarding. The laces frustrated him. Drawing on his background designing catheter technology for coronary angioplasties, he prototyped a dial-based closure system using guide wires. BOA Technology, founded in 2001 right here in the Yampa Valley, was acquired by Compass Diversified in 2020 for $454 million.4 The headquarters eventually moved to Denver. But it was born in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Colorado keeps proving the thesis
These aren’t anomalies. They’re a pattern.
Osprey Packs was started in 1974 by a teenager named Mike Pfotenhauer who learned to sew from his mother in Oregon because the backpacks he could find didn’t fit. He opened a shop in Santa Cruz, California — then relocated the entire operation in 1990 to Dolores, Colorado (population: 900), because he’d heard about skilled Navajo stitchers in the area and because the mountains were right there. Osprey moved production to Cortez, Colorado in 1994 and built a 30,000-square-foot factory. The company was acquired by Helen of Troy in 2021 for $414.7 million.5
Chaco. Osprey. Smartwool. BOA. Four of the most consequential outdoor brands of the last three decades. All built within a few hours of each other in rural Colorado. None of them started in New York or Chicago or Atlanta. They started where the problems lived — on the river, on the mountain, in the boot room, on the chairlift.
And it’s still happening. Kyle Siegel spent years as a mechanical engineer at SpaceX and then on the performance outerwear team at The North Face. He moved to Carbondale — Roaring Fork Valley, population 7,000, backed up against the Elk Mountains. In October 2023 he launched Raide Research, a technical backcountry ski and mountain running brand built around one frustration: the market had split into ultralight-at-all-costs and fully-featured-but-heavy, and nobody was solving for the person who wanted both. First-season sell-through rate: 97%. Coverage in Powder, GearJunkie, Field Mag, WildSnow, and Believe in the Run — all within 18 months of launch. Carbondale, Colorado. The thesis is still proving itself.
It’s not just Colorado
In 2007, two outdoorsmen based in Ketchum, Idaho got frustrated by a specific problem. Merino wool was transforming performance layering across skiing and snowboarding — odor control, temperature regulation, moisture management. But nobody had figured out how to print camouflage on it. If you were an archery hunter, you were still wearing the same scratchy synthetic layers everyone had always worn. Scott Robinson and Kenton Carruth figured out how to print camo on merino at a time when nobody was printing on merino at all. First Lite was eventually acquired by MeatEater, Inc. and is now the standard in high-performance hunting apparel.6 Ketchum, Idaho. Two people who moved there to be in the mountains. A problem they found on every hunt.
In 1989, a Vancouver climber named Dave Lane grew frustrated with the climbing harnesses available to him and started making his own at home — a company he called Rock Solid Manufacturing. The rebrand to Arc’teryx came in 1991, with a new name pulled from the fossil record. North Vancouver isn’t a small town in the traditional sense, but it was and is a mountaineering community — the Coast Mountains out the back door, the climbing culture woven into daily life. Arc’teryx was acquired by the Salomon Group in 2001 and is now part of Amer Sports. It is arguably the most technically advanced outdoor apparel brand on the planet.7
Three reasons this keeps happening
Proximity is the product. You cannot design a better wader if you’ve never stood in a cold river for six hours. You cannot improve a sandal’s strap system if you’ve never guided clients through the Gunnison Gorge with wet feet all day. The founders of these companies weren’t customers. They were users — often professional users — of the products they eventually built. The feedback loop between the problem and the solution was measured in feet, not miles. Startup Colorado puts it plainly: “Living and operating from a rural region — directly adjacent to the landscapes that inspire the products — is an experience that informs more than a lunch run or weekend retreat.”8
Lifestyle is the talent strategy. Rural outdoor towns recruit a very specific kind of person — someone who took a pay cut to be near the mountains, the river, the trail system. That person tends to care deeply about the products they work on, because those products are part of their actual life. Peter Duke said it plainly when talking about Steamboat’s outdoor brand cluster: “People who aspire to bring better products to the market — that spirit of person — tend to live in places like this.”9 Smartwool’s departure from Steamboat in 2018 spawned a half-dozen new companies built by former employees who stayed in Routt County because that’s where they wanted to be, not because a corporation told them to.10
Place is the brand. This one gets underestimated. When Chaco founder Mark Paigen said he moved to Paonia for “the beauty and small-town atmosphere,” he was describing more than a lifestyle choice. He was describing a brand origin story that no amount of marketing could manufacture later. When Voormi deliberately relocated to Pagosa Springs (population 1,700) to make outerwear from Rocky Mountain wool, their co-founder said: “There are no major interstates here, no major airports. Part of being an authentic brand is living the lifestyle that we preach.”11 The ZIP code wasn’t a handicap. It was equity.
Colorado is starting to institutionalize this
I’m based in Steamboat Springs, and I watch this play out in real time. The state has been building the scaffolding to support it.
Colorado’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office (OREC) has deployed nearly $3.8 million in grant funding across 50 projects since 2022 — lab buildouts at Western Colorado University, innovation summits in Crested Butte, rural technical assistance that pairs graduate students with communities that have historically had to solve these problems alone.12 Startup Colorado extends the capital network — pitch competitions, peer cohorts, partnerships with the Howdy Partners — into rural counties that most investors still don’t visit.
And then there’s Rural Is Rad — a collective of brands that treat their location as an identity rather than a liability. Less a formal program than a declaration. Right here in Routt County, BAR-U-EAT received a $40,000 Rural Jump-Start grant to purchase equipment for their organic adventure bar production — and Governor Polis signed the program’s renewal at their Hayden facility. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in a Denver WeWork.
And if you want to know whether the market exists for what these brands are making — Lloyd Vogel built a whole company around proving it does. Garage Grown Gear is an e-commerce platform and editorial site that exists entirely to surface ultralight cottage brands — the small, often one-person operations making gear in garages and spare rooms that never had a path to the customer. Lloyd’s thesis is simple: the best gear in the world is often being made by the person who needed it most and couldn’t find it. Getting it to the right buyer is the only problem Garage Grown Gear exists to solve.
According to the 2023 Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan, outdoor recreation contributes $36.5 billion to Colorado’s GDP and supports over 404,000 jobs — 12% of the entire state labor force.13 The state is starting to recognize what the founders already knew: the next Smartwool is probably being built right now in a small mountain valley somewhere in this state.
The question for capital
When I talk to founders from rural Colorado — from Carbondale, from Glenwood, from Steamboat — I notice something. They almost always apologize for where they’re located. “We’re not in Boulder,” they say. “We know that’s a barrier.”
Some of the best outdoor brands in the world were born in barns. In spare rooms. In garages above river towns. The founders who built them weren’t there by accident. They were there because the problem was there. The terrain was there. The culture was there. The feedback loop that makes a product worth buying was right out the back door.
Their rural address wasn’t a handicap. It was their secret sauce.
If you’re building an outdoor brand and you’re based somewhere most investors can’t find on a map — I’d love to hear from you.
I’m Andrew Luter, founder of Rio Chato Investments. We back early-stage outdoor recreation and lifestyle brands — the kind of companies building gear and experiences for people who’d rather be outside. I’m based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is basically a full-time reminder of why this space matters.
Disclosure: Rio Chato Investments is an investor in BAR-U-EAT.
Sources
Christian Science Monitor, “A proudly American shoe company ships jobs to China,” Aug. 2008
Visit Sun Valley, “What We’re Made Of: First Lite Entrepreneur Scott Robinson”
Colorado Sun, “Outdoor Business Town USA,” Dec. 2020 (Peter Duke quote)
Colorado Sun, “When Smartwool left Steamboat Springs,” Aug. 2022