We are not exactly sure when it happened, but sometime after the industrial revolution, and when the factories rose up, replacing manpower with machines,  and the majority of our father’s joined corporate America, and those turkey and gravy television dinners were being consumed on couches, there came a shift in men. 

No longer did ordinary men have to fight in a war, we had our military. No longer did we have to settle a dispute on our own, we had a police force or lawyers. No longer did we have to farm, raise, or kill our own meat, eggs, or milk, we had grocery stores.

So we settled into a rather safe life. We got a little too soft and domesticated. We cared too much about things we probably shouldn’t be caring so much about. We lived a little too much for money. No longer was hard work and integrity idealized in a man like our grandfather's era. It was more like tanning, hair gel products, and six-pack tight abs were the new man's symbol of success. As Brad Paisley sings, “it's hip now to be feminized.” 

Like anything, I first had to deal with my own junk in all this (and I had a lot of it). After graduating from the University of Tennessee, I got married and moved to Colorado. It was a journey of sorts. From experiencing another side of the country and really myself. I learned a few lessons my academic life missed. I picked up some experiences with some older men hunting and fly fishing. I went to work for a house painting company where I learned lessons that my private school education couldn't teach me and with a group of men that pushed me in ways that brought me to some new discoveries about myself.

In time, a buddy and I started a wilderness program to teach some of these lessons to younger guys as well. We felt it was important to give back. We gave them blue collar jobs to learn the lessons of hard work, brought in teachers to cover areas about understanding the heart of a women to dealing with the issues relating to the lack of fathers and how our culture had sort of messed all of this masculinity up.  We didn't make much money at it, but we loved it.

We realized that clothes were reflecting this cultural trend as well. Men in the deep south were covered head to toe in velveteen rabbit pinks and dandelion daisy yellows. While we were the first to enjoy some pastels, and put on a pink tie, it felt like a man over the past few years had become defined by these extreme colors. Then there were all those New York fashion companies experimenting with men by dressing them in what appeared more like women's fashion with things like studded and embellished jeans and selling sex over the actual clothes. Morality was thrown out the window.

But the other side was kind of doing a different version of this. The rugged and technical gear companies of the west were "designed" for the summit of Everest. Selling the mountain life to mostly suburban kids that hadn't seen a mountain top beyond their computer screen saver. There were also the blue collar type companies promoting a man as only tough or made for a construction site. No ties or pastels in this image. Style and image was frowned down upon.

It just seemed to us there was a great divide in men just like how clothing was being marketed. You had to pick one. You could be defined as a super style lovin' pretty boy in pastels, a skinny jean hipster from New York or a rugged cowboy mountain man from Colorado.

It was really confusing to us. We felt there was something valuable in each of them, including our southern roots of style and traditions, those gentleman's values, with a respect for the styles of New York, and a need of the outdoors and mountains as part of a man. 

As we looked  back to men in our great-grandfather's era. Men like Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. These seemed to possess all these traits that had become subdivided. They were classy, rugged, intelligent, and outdoorsman. They could be found in the city giving speeches at black tie events or just as at home in the mountains in solitude. They embodied it all.

We discovered that clothing companies in the past offered these in one store. But they were no longer around. They had gone out of business or switched to more pop-trends over the years and cashed in on the next phase of clothing that had put us in this current condition. For example, Abercrombie and Fitch sold Teddy Roosevelt supplies for his trip down the Amazon and probably would have sold a rifle to your grandfather (this is one of their old ads)...

Now it sells this…

These really cool people, Mel and Patricia Ziegler, who loved to travel all over the world, thought it would be great to create a clothing company that would promote travels and adventures in people, even safari type lifestyles. They called it Banana Republic and it started as this...

But Gap bought them and turned them into this...

We felt like there was something important in the past. In the clothes that had been lost. And the men who had gone before us. So the idea came… a clothing company for men. Classic styles that also were rugged. Not just for mountain sherpa’s. Or for beach lovin’ boys. But a company that offered styles with both classic and timeless traditions and with a rugged side as well. We would follow something of the past, of those men and their values with intergrity. Like Roosevelt, Muir, Hemingway, and Churchill to name a few.

We thought we could build the company by word of mouth. Not by big money or huge marketing campaigns with models. We didn't have the money anyways. But we would do it honestly and organically. If it worked, it would be because people believed in it, not because we created a trend with models and designers. It would be a movement of sorts. Through people who believed this was important too.  The idea of hard work, honest values, classic styles, and a little rugged side.

That is our founding idea, and our concept. We sure would love to have you part of it.