Avery Trufelman

I knew this would be hard to report on.

I mean, already, if you look at the websites of outdoor companies who contract with the military or make these special ops clothes, those clothes are really hard to find.

Like, they bury it on their website a little bit.

You have to dig around for these clothes and just know they exist.

Like, Patagonia used to put their own name on the uniforms and special ops clothes they made until they started manufacturing them under a company called Lost Arrow Project.

And now it's a rebranded independent company called ForgeLine Solutions.

And I was trying to find someone who could just talk to me in an in-depth way about this.

Like, at Functional Fabric Fair, I saw Vibram had a booth.

And you know Vibram, they make the shoe soles.

So I went up to them and at first they were like, hey, what's up?

It's widely known that Vibram souls are in military boots.

They even had some military souls right there on display in their booth.

And when I asked them about their military work, they suddenly got real jumpy.

And not only was she willing to talk, she was like, come on over to our headquarters and see what we're all about.

Kat Sheaway is the vice president of design and innovation at the popular outdoor brand Outdoor Research.

Kat was taking me up the steps of Outdoor Research's office building in downtown Seattle, where she was going to show me, openly, matter-of-factly, what Outdoor Research manufactures for the United States Army.

With outdoor research, it's right there on their homepage.

There's a tab that says tactical and you can just click it and it says same outdoors, different mission.

Outdoor Research began as a civilian outdoor gear company.

And pretty early on in the company, Outdoor Research started making equipment for the special operations community.