Avery Trufelman

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.

They started doing this in the 80s.

They've been in that game for a really long time.

And Outdoor Research became especially known for this high-tech glove system.

That's Alex Rodero, head of tactical at Outdoor Research.

Like gloves for the entire army, which is just...

An entire next level of scale.

Making clothes for the military is one of the only last remaining domestic clothing industries that we have because it's a matter of national security, right?

We don't want our clothes for our military to be made in another country because if we went to war with that country, that would give them a major tactical advantage.

They could, whatever, lace all our clothes with arsenic or not give us clothes, you know?