On Halloween of 1993, an eclectic group of industry experts with iconoclast tendencies, imagined a wilder path and named it Mountain Hardwear.

At a time of rapid change in the outdoor industry, they wanted to design for the mountain, not the masses. They wanted to build durable outdoor equipment that lasts. And on the scariest day of the year, they risked it all for a future they believed in.

Embracing the unknown, our nine founders—five women and four men—left Sierra Designs (more so, its holding company, Odyssey International Inc.) as a group with a feeling of horrifying excitement.

For 30 years, we've made durable performance equipment that works because, out here, it matters. We’ve picked up some wisdom over the past few decades, but we still prefer to live by our own rules (and break them).

When you have less than ten people trying to start a company, there are no lanes, let alone departments or job descriptions. Everybody’s just doing their best to get an idea off the ground. We’ve come a long way since then, but we still prefer the “by any means necessary” philosophy that got us here.

Al Tabor describes it best. “On any given day, I would either be buying Gore-Tex coats or trying to fix the printer; and whether I fixed the printer before buying the coats depended on what you were trying to print.