In 2012 I was fresh out of architecture school and sick of ugly outdoor clothes. Everything on the shelves for women was either khaki or green and consisted of zip-off pants or shapeless boring things. So, I bought a $100 serger (a cool kind of sewing machine) on ebay and started sewing clothes to sell on Etsy. My materials were thrift store clothes that I would spend hours shopping for and cutting up to sew into really wacky things that were colorful and weird and one of a kind.

Fast forward a couple of years and I quit my design job to make clothes full time. I traveled around the country going to countless events to sling clothes and find new customers. You name it was there. Yoga festival in the desert? Yep. Hemp festival in the mountains? Yep. Fine art show in Chicago with a booth I bought at Ikea that morning? All the above. I drove my truck all around the U.S. for years and slept in the back of it while I sewed clothes in between events.

My business moved out of my spare bedroom and into a series of very odd Missoula rentals. Here was the windowless basement of a sawmill. It was $150/months. Next was a tiny space that shared a wall with a hot yoga studio so I worked in my undies a lot.

Eventually using thrifted fabrics was totally unsustainable. I couldn’t find enough material for the amount of demand my clothes had. And I couldn’t keep up with sewing everything either. So, I decided I would make fabric! I watched a lot of Youtube videos and learned how to make prints, then I found a great partner factory to print them. Today, I’m still the print and fabric designer at Youer. But working with factories to cut and sew my stuff would be the beginning of more headache and loss and stress than I could have ever imagined.

2020 was a very pivotal moment for this business as it was for so many. Factory shutdowns and some extreme production errors and misuse of our material (lack of accountability is rampant in this industry) meant I was left without a team, without an office, without product to sell and staring down the reality of closing my doors. This was from the day I decided we weren't going back to work in that office and I moved out. My truck died parked the wrong way on a one way street. But that wasn’t going to be the end of my story. Motivated by the fact that I knew I didn’t want to work for anyone else again, I decided to just start telling the story of what it takes to manufacture clothes. I made videos about supply chains, wrote posts exposing the ridiculous waste of the fashion industry and basically just told people what being a small fashion brand was like. It stuck. And you all stuck around to be part of it.

So, I decided to leave the dumpster fire behind in 2020 with that old business name (we were called Kind Apparel) and rebranded as Youer when we finally got production rolling again after 7 months. But production never really ‘rolled’. After working with nearly 20 factories over the last decade, what I’ve learned is this: no one is going to care about the quality of your product as much as you. After losing hundreds of thousands (if not a million at this point) of dollars to complacent production mistakes at out-of-house facilities in 2021 we (and I mean Youer and YOU) started to build our own factory together. After a successful 2021 community funding campaign I called the CSA (Community Supported Apparel) the Youer community provided funds for us to get our own building to start our own factory in Missoula Montana so we could tell a different story – one of a new approach to apparel production. 

In 2023, we opened The Youniverse! A quirky and magical space that houses our whole team and all operations. And often our community! We’ve hosted ski films, yoga classes, sample sales, potlucks, launch parties, plant swaps and much more in The Youniverse. We made a large portion of our clothes here with our wonderful team for 2 years. We made thousands of pieces of clothing and taught ourselves how to run a factory.

We moved into our very own building! And yes, I wrote down 'buy a Quonset hut' in my notebook in 2020 - manifestation is real, people! As a team, we made this building colorful and vibrant. But in-house production cost an enormous amount of resources - hiring was a never ending challenge, and it became clear we couldn't run both a factory AND a successful brand simultaneously. . So, in late 2024 we transitioned 100% of production to our partner factory in California. They are phenomenal, talented, organized and have given us the ability to grow in other ways.

Today, we are a team of 4 creative, caring, talented, dedicated and loving humans and our workdays really just feel like hanging out with your friends making cool shit. Every year it feels like we grow and develop into a new business as we’re faced with new challenges and opportunities. If you told me back in 2012, that 13 years from now this would be my life, that clothes would have connected me with thousands of incredible people all around the world, I would have never believed you. I'm so grateful for this wild journey and to be sharing it with all of you! I love you all so much! See what we do every day here.