Most outdoor brands start with a product. This one started with a frustration—and a pretty specific one.
Back in 2014, Davis Smith was spending time in Latin America and kept running into the same thing: incredible landscapes, incredible people, and a glaring gap between the outdoor industry’s glossy “adventure” marketing and the reality of the communities those adventures passed through. He came home and started a company with an unusual founding question. Not “what can we sell?” but “what can we build that actually does something good?” That question became a public benefit corporation, a certified B Corp, and a brand built around a simple idea: gear for good.
What “gear for good” actually means
It would be easy to slap a “sustainable” label on a backpack and call it a day. We went a different route. By 2024, over 96% of our products were made with recycled, repurposed, or otherwise responsible materials—a goal we’d set for 2025 and hit a year early. Our Allpa travel packs, the ones you see on airport carousels and hostel bunks from Denver to Da Nang, got a full redesign in 2025: a front zip pocket that actually fits a paperback, a back panel that doesn’t turn your spine into a swamp, and a hip belt you can tuck away when you’re just running to the coffee shop. The Fuego down jackets use recycled fabric and pack down small enough to live in a daypack without eating the whole thing. And the Del Día line—bags made from leftover fabric—means no two are exactly alike, which is either a feature or a personality test depending on how you feel about matching your friends.
The part that doesn’t show up on a spec sheet
One percent of annual product revenue goes to the Cotopaxi Foundation, which funds anti-poverty work with a focus on Latin America—health care, education, livelihood programs. That’s not a marketing campaign. It’s built into the business model. Every time someone buys a pack or a jacket, a slice of that sale goes somewhere it’s needed more than a billboard.
And when things break
They will. Gear gets dragged through airports, sat on, rained on, and occasionally forgotten in the back of a pickup. Our Guaranteed for Good™ promise means if something fails because of a manufacturing defect, we repair it, replace it, or credit you—for the lifetime of the product. Not because we’re saints. Because a backpack that lasts ten years is a backpack that doesn’t end up in a landfill in two.
We’re still a relatively small team, still headquartered in Salt Lake City, still figuring things out as we go. But the throughline hasn’t changed since that first frustration: make gear worth keeping, and make keeping it mean something.