Who we are · Bozeman, MT
About Us
We're not a brand with a story bolted on after the fact. We're a few people who live this way and make the gear we wished we could buy.
Why this exists
The long way
home
I was born just outside New York City. My dad worked on Wall Street, gone on the early train before the sun came up and back long after it went down. One day he hit his breaking point. He packed up all seven of us and moved west: my mother, my two brothers, my two sisters, and me. I was in elementary school.
I grew up on a ranch outside Bozeman, Montana. We traded loafers for boots and button-downs for t-shirts. We helped ranchers brand cattle when they were short-handed. We hunted. We fished. We were outside almost all of the time.
Then I did the thing you're supposed to do. I went to college, and I ended up back in New York working in finance. I spent my days inside an Excel sheet, looking out the window as the sun went down on another one. After five years of that, I walked into my boss's office and quit. I spent a month traveling across Europe with no plan for what came next. I just knew that finance and New York weren't it.
So I moved back to Bozeman and became a ski instructor at Bridger Bowl. I crammed into a small house with six other guys, all of us living a proper dirtbag existence. It was the opposite of everything New York had been. When I asked those guys what they did, they'd say: I fly fish. I bike. I ski. I hike. Nobody answered with a job.
I asked what they did. Nobody answered with a job.
I loved it. But then I watched my college friends climbing in their careers, and I started to feel like I was missing out. So I got back in. I landed in San Francisco, joining early-stage companies, chasing the billion-dollar exit.
I was mindlessly chasing the thing society had told me to want my whole life. Money. And then I was diagnosed with cancer, and the whole story fell apart in my hands. Five days a week, building someone else's dream, asking permission to step outside. That was not the life I wanted. I wanted a life of adventure, one that wasn't chained to a desk.
I started craving the dirtbag existence I had walked away from.
That's why this exists.
BOZOS is a storybook for the people living life on their own terms. We're trying to find more of them. Call it my way back.
CharlieFounder, BOZOS
The founding father
John
Shocklee
Every word of our ethos started with one person. Ski guide in Silverton by winter, river guide in the Grand Canyon by summer, Peter Pan by reputation.
John is the original bozo. The proof that you can build a whole life out of the two best seasons, back to back, forever. He isn't on the payroll. He's the reason there's a payroll.
No spam. Just good dirt.
Join the Crew
Drops, dispatches, and the occasional river report. We'll tell you when the good stuff lands and where to be.