Field Notes · Ownership

Who Owns Your Heritage Brand? Why Founder-Led Still Matters

When you buy a jacket or a bag from a brand with a hundred years of history, you are buying the history too. The name on the label is a promise that somebody, somewhere, still makes it the way it was made when the name was earned.

The question almost nobody asks is who is keeping that promise now.

I have run Buffalo Jackson since 2009. I have watched brands I admired get bought, sold, merged and sold again. Some held up. Some did not. What follows is a plain look at who owns the names you know, what tends to happen when the founder leaves, and why I think a founder who is still in the room matters more than most people realise.

Why does a founder-led company matter?

A founder carries something that does not show up on a spec sheet. He knows why the pocket sits where it sits, why that leather was chosen over the cheaper one, and which corner the factory will try to cut if nobody is watching. He knows because he made those calls himself, usually more than once, usually after getting one of them wrong.

Three things tend to follow from that.

The horizon is long. A founder expects to be answering for the product in ten years. That changes how you decide whether to save two dollars on a zipper.

The decisions are close to the product. In a founder-led company, the person approving the leather is often the same person who answers the angry email when it fails. There are not five layers of management between the customer and the decision.

The name is personal. When the brand is your name, or your life's work, a bad batch is not a line item. It is embarrassing. That is a powerful form of quality control, and it cannot be bought.

None of that makes a founder infallible. Founders make bad calls all the time. But the incentive points the right way: toward the next twenty years of customers, not the next sale of the company.

Founder-led and family-owned brands still standing

These are brands where the founder, or the family that built the business, is still in charge.

Saddleback Leather

Dave Munson started Saddleback by selling leather bags out of his vehicle, and he still runs it as founder and CEO. The company now employs more than 130 people and sells only through its own website and eBay. Munson has said he will not take venture capital, which tells you a great deal about who he intends to answer to. The bags are made in workshops in León, Mexico, that he set up in 2008. It is one of the clearest examples in the leather trade of a founder whose personality and standards are still the brand.

Overland Sheepskin Co.

Jim and Leslie Leahy started Overland in Taos, New Mexico, in 1973 with a bale of sheepskins and a secondhand sewing machine. More than fifty years later it is still family-owned, run by Jim's brother Roger Leahy as CEO, and has grown to around two dozen stores, mostly in Western mountain towns. Overland's coats are made by contract artisans around the world rather than in its own factory, and that is worth noticing. Family ownership is not about where the needle goes in. It is about who sets the standard and who is still around to keep it. Overland is proof that a family brand can grow for half a century without selling the name.

Schott NYC

Brothers Irving and Jack Schott founded the company in 1913, and Irving designed the first leather motorcycle jacket, the Perfecto, in 1928. The Schott family is now in its fourth generation running the business, and the Perfecto is still made in the company's own factory in Union, New Jersey.

Pendleton Woolen Mills

Pendleton is a sixth-generation family business descended from Thomas Kay's Oregon wool operation of 1863 and the Bishop family. It still weaves in its own mills in Pendleton, Oregon, and Washougal, Washington, and John Bishop chairs the board.

Orvis

Charles Orvis founded the company in Vermont in 1856. The Perkins family bought it in 1965 and still owns it, now in the third generation. Strictly speaking, that makes Orvis family-owned rather than founder-led, but the effect is the same: one family, with its name on the line, for sixty years.

Frost River

Frost River's waxed canvas packs were nearly lost when the original business closed in 2008. Chris Benson bought the equipment, rehired the makers and reopened it in 2009. He still owns it, and the bags are still sewn on-site in Duluth, Minnesota.

What happens when the founder leaves?

Founders leave for all kinds of reasons. They retire. They die. They get tired. They get an offer they would be foolish to refuse. None of that is a scandal, and sometimes the next owner is better for the business than the founder was.

But something is always at risk in the handoff, and it is the thing that cannot be written into a contract: the foundation. The reasons behind the decisions. The relationships with the tanneries and the sewing rooms. The willingness to lose money on a batch rather than ship it.

When a new owner keeps that foundation and builds on it, the brand can go on for another hundred years. When a new owner treats the name as the asset and the product as a cost to be managed, the label stays the same while what is underneath it slowly changes. The customer is usually the last to find out.

The clearest warning sign is not a single sale. It is what comes after.

When the brand becomes the deal

A heritage brand earns its name over decades. One family, one standard, one way of doing things. Then it sells.

The first sale is rarely the problem. The trouble starts when a brand gets sold again, and again. Frye has passed through more than half a dozen owners since the family sold it in 1949. Belstaff has had six owners since its founders. Woolrich went through three owners in nine years after nearly two centuries with the Rich family. Filson has had four owners since the Filson family let it go.

Every sale comes with a clock. An investment firm buys a brand planning to sell it in a few years at a higher price. That means the numbers have to grow fast. Growth on a deadline usually comes from the same few places: more products, more stores, more licensing, cheaper ways to make what is already selling. None of that is illegal or even unusual. But the deal comes first, and the brand comes second.

Then the people change. A new owner brings a new CEO, a new creative director, a new plan. The designer who knew why a pocket sat where it did moves on. The factory relationships get re-bid. A few years later the next buyer arrives and it starts over.

The customer feels it as inconsistency. The jacket you bought ten years ago fits differently now. The leather feels different. The name on the label is the same, but nobody behind it remembers why it was made that way.

A brand stays strong through steady hands, and steady hands are the first thing a revolving door takes away.

Heritage brands that have changed hands

The facts below come from public reporting and company announcements. I have stuck to who owns what and what has documentably changed. Whether the product is better or worse is for you to judge, ideally with one in your hands.

Filson

Clinton C. Filson outfitted Klondike prospectors from Seattle in 1897. His family held the company until 1970. Private equity firm Brentwood Associates bought it in 2005 and sold it in 2012 to Bedrock Manufacturing, the Dallas investment company that also owns Shinola. According to published reporting, Filson's U.S. share of production fell from about 90 percent in 2015 to about 35 percent by 2025, its Seattle-area workforce fell from 369 people to fewer than 100, and in 2023 it announced plans to move most remaining Seattle production to a contractor in Los Angeles. Filson still makes some heavy-duty pieces in the United States. It is also, today, a much broader and more varied range than the one its founder built.

Woolrich

Woolrich was owned by the Rich family from 1830 until 2016, which is one of the longest family runs in American apparel. Then came three owners in nine years: the Italian licensee WP Lavori in Corso in 2016, private equity firm L-GAM in 2018, and the Italian group BasicNet in December 2025. The last Woolrich mill in Woolrich, Pennsylvania, closed in 2018.

Belstaff

Eli Belovitch and his son-in-law Harry Grosberg founded Belstaff in Longton, Staffordshire, in 1924, making waxed cotton gear for motorcyclists. Since then it has had six owners: James Halstead, Italian businessman Franco Malenotti, the Labelux group, JAB Holdings, Jim Ratcliffe's INEOS and, from August 2025, the sportswear brand Castore. Along the way the original Longton factory closed, and the brand moved from riders' gear toward luxury fashion.

Frye

John A. Frye founded his boot company in Massachusetts in 1863. The family sold it in 1949, and over the following decades it passed through a long line of owners, including Alberto-Culver, Reebok's Rockport subsidiary, Jimlar and Li & Fung. In 2017 Authentic Brands Group bought a majority stake. Authentic Brands owns names and licenses them to other companies to design, make and sell the product. That is the furthest a heritage name can travel from its founder: the name is the asset, and the goods are made by whoever holds the license.

Eddie Bauer

Eddie Bauer opened his Seattle outdoor shop in 1920 and went on to patent America's first quilted down jacket. The company has since been through several corporate owners and, in 2021, was bought by Authentic Brands Group and SPARC Group. It runs on the same licensing model as Frye.

Wilsons Leather

For many Americans, Wilsons was the place you bought a leather jacket at the mall. The public company was liquidated in 2008. G-III Apparel Group bought the name, the website and 116 outlet stores, then announced in 2020 that it would close the remaining directly managed stores. The name survives largely online, owned by a large apparel company that makes products for many brands.

Boyt Harness and Gokey

Walter and John Boyt were leather-working brothers who started Boyt Harness in 1901, and the company made gun cases and military leather goods for decades. The family sold in 1963. Since 1996 Boyt has been owned by an investor group, and most of its products are made overseas. In 2020 it bought Gokey, the hunting boot and leather brand that dates to 1850, from Orvis. Boyt remains a serious maker of gun cases. It is simply no longer a family business.

AllSaints

AllSaints, the British label known for its leather jackets, was rescued by private equity firm Lion Capital and Goode Partners in 2011 after running into financial trouble. It remains investor-owned.

What a good change of ownership looks like

Brands do change hands, and some should. Frost River is still alive because somebody bought it. A founder should be free to hand off his life's work someday. The question is how.

In my view a good transition keeps five things:

• The standard. The leather grade, the hardware, the stitch count and the inspection that comes before anything ships.
• The makers. The workshops and tanneries that know the product, kept on rather than re-bid to the lowest quote.
• The details. The small decisions customers never notice until they are gone.
• A long horizon. An owner who plans to be answering for the product in ten years, not reselling it in three.
• Someone in the room. A person, not a portfolio, who looks at the product before the customer does.

If an owner keeps those five things, I do not much care what kind of owner it is.

Who's in the warehouse at Buffalo Jackson

I'm in the middle of all of it, and I want to be.

Buffalo Jackson isn't run by 400 people in a corporate office. It's a small team, and every one of us has our hands on the details. When a shipment lands, I'm in the warehouse going over the product. I inspect the shearling jackets. I pick the styles. I go back to our factories when something isn't right, and I don't sign off until it is. I'm at the photo shoots. I don't skimp on details, because the details are the product.

A rancher takes care of his horses, his cattle and his land. Nobody has to tell him to. That's his livelihood, and he'll be standing on that same ground next year. This business is the same for me. It isn't an asset I'm holding for a few years. It's my name and my work, and I care what shows up at your door.

We make our goods with partner workshops in Mexico, Turkey, and India, and I'm not shy about that. They are some of the best artisans around these days. I picked those workshops. I set the specs, choose the leather and send samples back until they are right. Where something is sewn matters less than whether somebody who cares is standing over it. That is the part of the job I will never hand to a spreadsheet.

That's what a good owner does. He cares, and he shows up.

See what a small team builds

Leather bags, shearling and outerwear, designed in Matthews, North Carolina, and looked over by the founder before they ship.

Read our story

How to find out who owns a brand before you buy

• Read the About page closely. Founder-led companies usually say so by name. Vague language about "our heritage" with no living person attached is worth noticing.
• Look for "a portfolio company of" or "a brand of". Those phrases, often in the footer or press page, tell you a parent company is involved.
• Search the brand name with "acquired". Ownership changes are almost always announced in the trade press.
• Check for a licensing arrangement. If the brand belongs to a licensing group, the product may be made by a different company entirely.
• Ask who signs off on the product. A good brand can tell you. A great one will tell you a name.

Common questions

Xan Hood founded Buffalo Jackson Trading Co. in 2009 and still runs it from Matthews, North Carolina. He works directly with leather makers in Mexico and India on bags, outerwear and sporting goods, and writes about how the things we carry are actually made.