Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

It's called the Association of the United States Army Trade Show, or AUSA.

So Avery is walking around AUSA trying to interview reps at those well-known clothing companies.

Yeah, I just want to be guarded.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, we don't know exactly why a number of these companies didn't want to talk to Avery about this part of the business, but you can sort of intuit why.

Like, maybe they don't want to broadcast their involvement with the military to customers who might be turned off by that arrangement.

But just when Avery was about to give up on getting an outdoor brand to talk about the business of military contracting, she did meet someone who was willing to talk.

It started with this special operations community that led us to develop a system, a seven-glove system for the special forces community.

And then that's cascaded into bigger army projects.

Now, one big reason that gear companies like Outdoor Research might want to work with the U.S.

military is, yes, the massive scale of their orders.

But it's also the fact that military clothing must, by law, be made in the United States.

Making military gear offers a means of subsidizing domestic manufacturing, which has become extremely rare in the clothing industry.

So military contracts offer a way for companies like Outdoor Research to diversify their supply chain and their streams of income.

The outdoor side where you've got seasonal forecasts and planning.

For us, I mean, the government's our best customer, but they're also our worst.

Like they don't plan and they can't give us a forecast, but then they'll come and they'll say, here's a large order out of nowhere.

And wow, that's great.

Thank you so much.

But now I can't fulfill it fast enough.