What Actually Happened With Bradshaw And Range
Waukegan isn't a gear town. It's a lakefront industrial suburb outside Chicago with a shipping port and a history of manufacturing that folded in the nineties. So when I first heard about Bradshaw and Range coming out of there, I assumed it was another heritage-washed startup trying to sell $200 flannels with a farm origin story. I was wrong, and that's probably why people are talking about them now. The company started around 2019, founded by two people who'd worked in technical apparel at Patagonia and Arc'teryx before burning out on seasonal collections and marketing budgets. They went back to Waukegan because rent was cheap and their parents had spare warehouse space. That's not a feel-good origin. It's just logistics. But it shaped what they actually built.
The Rise Of Bradshaw And Range Waukegan A Glimpse Into The Future Of Outdoor Gear
Their first product was a shell jacket that used a laminated membrane nobody had heard of — a proprietary TPU blend they sourced from a defunct textile mill in nearby Kenosha. The fabric was heavier than typical hardshells and the handfeel was stiff for about six months of wear before it softened. Most reviewers panned it initially. Then people who actually used it in the field started posting long-term updates, and the reputation flipped. What made them different wasn't the fabric alone. It was the construction. Traditional outdoor gear companies spend most of their R&D budget on things that show up in marketing copy: waterproof ratings, seam tape width, packability. Bradshaw and Range oriented their engineering toward things you only notice when something fails. Like the way their zipper baffles were cut from a single sheet instead of layered, which eliminated a whole category of moisture wicking issues that show up after three seasons of rain. Or how the pit zips on their midlayers had a secondary storm flap that nobody advertised but everyone who camped in wind regretted not having. I spent about fourteen months testing their early production run in the White Mountains and the Olympic Peninsula. The jacket held up. Nothing catastrophic happened, which is the right outcome for technical outerwear. But here's the thing I wish I'd known before buying: the sizing runs about half a size smaller through the shoulders than standard Patagonia or Mountain Hardwear cuts. If you're layering a fleece underneath, you need to size up. I learned that the hard way during a November trip when I couldn't get my arm over my head in a rucksack without the shoulder seams binding. Their customer service replaced it within two weeks, which was fine, but it cost me three days of lost hiking time. Don't skip the fit check if you plan to layer.
How Their Supply Chain Actually Works
This is where most people get confused. Bradshaw and Range don't manufacture in Waukegan. They design there. The actual sewing happens at a contract factory in North Carolina that also produces for a few smaller heritage brands. The fabric comes from Tennessee and Wisconsin mills. The YKK zippers are sourced through a distributor in Milwaukee. The raw TPU membrane is produced at a facility in Ohio that closed down in 2017 and then reopened under new ownership specifically to serve small-batch technical apparel companies. That last detail matters. Most outdoor gear manufacturers order millions of yards of fabric and negotiate prices that smaller companies can't touch. Bradshaw and Range ordered relatively small quantities, which means their per-yard cost is higher. They make up for it by keeping their product line narrow — maybe twelve SKUs per season instead of eighty — and by avoiding the seasonal color-drop model that drives most of the industry's inventory risk. I asked one of their founders about this during a podcast interview last year. He said something I've been thinking about since: the outdoor gear industry treats color variety as a growth strategy, but it's actually a waste management problem. Each new colorway requires a separate dye lot, a separate quality check, and inventory that sits in warehouses for months. By keeping their palette limited to six core colors and rotating only two seasonal additions, they cut their unsold inventory rate down to somewhere around four percent, compared to the industry average of fifteen to twenty percent.
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What They Got Wrong
I'm going to be blunt about this because nobody else seems to be. Their early backpack line was genuinely bad. I bought the 38-liter version in 2021 and returned it within a month. The hip belt stitching failed on day twelve of a week-long trip through the Enchantments. Not a manufacturing defect in the traditional sense — the thread was fine, but the pattern they used for the belt attachment point didn't distribute load correctly across the foam. The pack dug into my right iliac crest after about six hours of hiking with a full load, and by day three I'd developed a bruise that took two weeks to fade. Their response was slow. They acknowledged the issue publicly about eight months later and issued a recall, but the replacement pack they sent had the same attachment pattern. I ended up modifying my own by reinforcing the stress points with additional bar tacks and a piece of Dyneema underneath the fabric. That's not something most people are equipped to do, and it shouldn't be necessary on a product that costs $280. Their tents are better but still have a known issue with the vestibule zippers. The design uses a dual-zipper system that allows you to open from either end, which is convenient in theory. In practice, the zippers tend to catch on the fabric tape if you're not careful about angle when you're opening them in the dark. I've seen three different people on Reddit post about this exact problem. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's frustrating when you're setting up camp at 9 PM in the rain and your hands are cold.
Where The Industry Is Actually Heading
Bradshaw and Range aren't the first company to question the outdoor gear business model, but they might be the first to make it work at a scale that matters. The traditional model — release forty new products each season, create artificial obsolescence through color changes and minor feature tweaks, move volume through big box retailers — is collapsing under its own weight. Consumers are tired of buying gear that breaks in two years. Retailers are tired of markdowns that eat into margins. And the environmental cost of unsold inventory is becoming impossible to ignore. The alternative model is simpler and honestly a lot less exciting from a marketing standpoint. Make fewer products. Make them last longer. Don't change the colors every season. Price them reasonably and let word of mouth do the work. It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious until you realize almost no one in the industry is doing it, because the financial incentives are structured the other way. I think what's interesting about Bradshaw and Range specifically is that they came from inside the industry and saw the problem clearly. They know exactly which costs are arbitrary and which are real. A lot of their competitors could do the same thing if they wanted to, but they won't, because the stockholders expect year-over-year growth in SKUs and the CMOs need new product launches to justify their bonuses. That's not a conspiracy. It's just how the machinery works.
There's also the question of whether this model can scale. Twelve SKUs per season is manageable when you're a small team in a warehouse. It gets harder when you're shipping to twenty thousand customers across three continents. I don't know the answer to that. No one outside the company does. But the fact that they've been operating this way for five years without dramatic supply chain failures is more than I can say for several larger brands that have tried to adopt similar principles. If you're looking to buy from them, the current lineup is reasonable. The shells are genuinely good. The midlayers are unremarkable but functional. The lower-priced items like base layers and gloves are where they've found the best value, probably because those products don't require as much R&D and the margins are lower so they can price them competitively. I'd skip the backpacks for now and wait for whatever they release next, unless you're okay with DIY modifications. The company doesn't have retail presence outside their own website. That's a deliberate choice that makes buying slightly inconvenient but eliminates the middleman markup. You can find them at bradshawandrange.com, and they ship from a facility in Waukegan that I assume is still their parents' old warehouse. There's no store to visit. There's no pop-up at outdoor trade shows. You order online, you wait two weeks, and then you either like the gear or you don't.
That's probably why they're still around. The outdoor gear market is full of companies that look bigger than they are, and Bradshaw and Range look exactly as big as they are. That's either a sign of weakness or a sign of honesty. I've been wearing their jacket for two years now and it's holding up, so I'm leaning toward the latter.
