The Untold History of Outdoor Research, One of America's Great Gear Brands

Some companies trace their origins back to garages and basements, others to boardrooms. For Outdoor Research of Seattle, WA, it's somewhere around 12,500 feet up the side of Denali, North America's tallest mountain. That's where, in 1980, Ron Gregg, an avid outdoors lover and engineer with a PhD in nuclear physics, watched as his climbing partner was carried off in an airlift after suffering severe frostbite, putting an end to a summit bid they'd been planning for months. Gregg stayed back to ski the 100-mile route out solo, pick up supplies they'd cached on the way in, and, as legend has it, make plans for the company that would become Outdoor Research.

In this era, the outdoor industry was not yet overflowing with gear for any and all specialized needs or functions. That expedition-ending frostbite was the result of shoddy overboots, and when Gregg returned home he began working on a pair of gaiters that fit a wider variety of boots and secured with a cord underneath the instep. He dubbed it the X-Gaiter, and with an ad that cheekily read, "There's really no reason for wet feet or cold toes," Outdoor Research was on the scene.

Gregg may have left his scientific profession behind with the pivot to brand founder, but he brought the methods of that work to his small gear company (hence the R in OR). He'd identify a problem, make something to fix it, and then spend time in the field testing the thing he made to make sure it worked in the extreme conditions he liked to put himself in. That's how Outdoor Research came to its second product, cloth first-aid kits for backpackers with pockets for organization (which were picked up and quickly sold out by REI).

The research-driven method helped create a number of items that have grown to iconic status in the outdoor gear world, now four decades later—you can't talk about Outdoor Research without bringing up the Seattle Sombrero (now called the Seattle Rain Hat). The Pacific Northwest is well known for being a damp corner of the country, and Gregg, who wore glasses, was constantly frustrated by fogging when he had to wear a hood. So he used Gore-Tex to make a wide-brim rain hat, and it turned into OR's best-selling product.

Gregg didn't respond to trends or focus groups, he responded to necessity. Like the Seattle Sombrero, OR's Gore-Tex-equipped Baker Mitts found devotees over many years, particularly in the '90s when snowboarders adopted them as the still-growing sport's unofficial handwear. Often, this put OR ahead of the times, as proved to be the case for the softshell pants he developed in the '80s.

Gregg's ideas about what made gear good became the core of Outdoor Research's values. If the company had an operating philosophy, it was "function first." Aesthetics weren't important; to Gregg, they were a silly distraction. All that mattered was whether the gear OR made held up at 20,000 feet or in an all-out downpour or after seasons of doing both. This was no secret—in a 1997 Seattle Times article about the company, the writer editorializes, "one can't help but notice, well, how ugly many of the products are." Gregg probably took it as a compliment.

By making stuff that worked, Outdoor Research's growth through the decades was steady and upward. But on March 17, 2003, the company hit the crux in its path when Gregg and a companion were killed in an avalanche while backcountry skiing in British Columbia's Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. The year remains one of the worst on record for avalanche deaths in Canada.

Gregg was Outdoor Research, and Outdoor Research was Gregg. Without its mustachioed, classical music-whistling, sometimes-combative leader at the helm, the fate of the company was up in the air. Gregg's younger brother Bob took over and, with no strong desire to take over in the long term, went searching for buyers. The likeliest candidates were the larger gear companies, but that would've meant OR getting absorbed, end of the story.

As fate would have it, Bob received a phone call from a local businessman looking for a new opportunity. "The family realized that I was going to come to the office and try to keep the people all there," says Dan Nordstrom, who ended up purchasing Outdoor Research shortly after Gregg's death in 2003. Nordstrom had spent the previous decade and a half working for the family biz—yes, that Nordstrom—and people inside OR were skeptical of his “outdoors” businessman background.

But Nordstrom had an adventurous background of his own. He'd grown up in the Cascades skiing in Alpental’s back bowls every weekend, moved to Colorado seeking bigger mountains, and became enamored with rock climbing and telemark skiing. In the '80s, he and a few friends did an east-to-west ski traverse of the Cascades (a story about the trip became the first ski mountaineering article published by Climbing Magazine). "There was a picture of me with a big pack, skis on my pack, and X-Gaiters straddling a log trying to work my way across a river," Nordstrom says. The image went around the office. "That sort of settled everyone down."

By the time Nordstrom got to Outdoor Research, the outdoor industry had evolved well beyond the sew-it-yourself Frostline kits that were de rigueur in those early days. Other brands were offshoring manufacturing to Asia in the 1990s, and with access to those factories, it was easy for those brands to get into the accessories space that OR had owned for so long. OR on the other hand was still making everything in Seattle.

"In the first couple months, I was like, oh, shit, what have I done?" Nordstrom tells me. So he got to work, jumpstarting an apparel program and doing something that Gregg had long refused to do: he began to focus on how the gear looked. Nordstrom recalls thinking how if they could only combine the function and durability that OR already had nailed down with aesthetics, they'd really be onto something.

Under Nordstrom, Outdoor Research also moved much of its manufacturing overseas—to where the fabrics and best machines are. But the company had long been proud of its production operations in the US—it still makes gloves and gaiters here—and Nordstrom was committed to keeping their Seattle factory up and running, and staffed. “Ron clearly loved being able to go from drawing up an idea on graph paper in his office (his desk was still full of such drawings when I came in) and then head downstairs and have the sample made in a few hours. That instinct for innovation and rapid prototyping has always been and remains core to the OR DNA,” said Nordstrom. He found the key to doing that in an unlikely place for an outdoor gear and apparel company: the US military.

In the '90s, Army Rangers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in nearby Tacoma would come to OR for gloves that were far better than the Korean War-era gear they'd been issued. Most of the military business was through small pro-deal agreements, but in the early 2000s Nordstrom went after bigger contracts, and got them. "We're really the only technical glove manufacturer still based in the US," Nordstrom says (US law requires the military to source equipment from companies that manufacture domestically). While some outdoor companies are quiet about their dealings with the military, OR is proud to design gloves and gear that meet the high standards required by service members. "Politics aside, these are people we know, and their jobs demand gear that is reliable when it matters most. We need to take care of them," Nordstrom tells me.

Today, Outdoor Research makes everything from carbon-neutral rain jackets and lightweight technical clothing to mountain biking apparel and gear for backcountry skiing and snowboarding. Even if the company has become a little more thoughtful about how these things look—and adopted colors other than red, yellow, and blue—Ron Gregg's “it's-gotta-work” ethos is still at the brand's core. As is innovating new features that make exploring outside more enjoyable. The Seattle Sombrero (ahem, Rain Hat) is still an inexplicable best-seller. And, even after more than 40 years, OR's gaiters remain the best in the biz.

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