We Had to Break It to Save It
A dispatch from the edge by Will Watters, Co-Founder of Western Rise
Western Rise was born in the mountains.
Not in a boardroom. Not on a mood board. In Vail, between early mornings on skin tracks and late nights dreaming of a different kind of life. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I knew what I wanted: gear that could keep up. That could go from trail to town, sweat to street, without making you feel like you had to change your clothes or your identity.
But the idea didn’t become real until a few years later. I was living in Georgia, commuting an hour each way in traffic, wearing pressed khakis and a tucked-in shirt, sitting under fluorescent lights wondering what the hell happened. I was 26 and already dying inside. I’d traded the mountains for meetings. Freedom for familiarity. I remember staring at my reflection one morning and thinking: If I don’t build this thing now, I never will.
Because once you’ve seen the other side, the real side, you can’t go back.
In 2011, I spent six months as a ski instructor in Australia. That turned into a loose, glorious blur across Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia with my two best friends — nothing but an extra shirt in a backpack and no real agenda. We moved on instinct, slept where we landed, and woke up every day with nothing to do but explore. Then in 2012, I lived on a remote island in Belize. Taught myself how to saltwater fly fish. Nearly got stabbed in a local bar. Rode out a hurricane evacuation by sandbagging my favorite beach shack. It was chaos. It was perfect. It was freedom in its purest form. The kind of freedom you don’t realize you’ve been missing until you taste it. And once you have, you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back.
So I built Western Rise with my (now) wife (who has way more and way crazier travel stories than I do) as a way back. Back to movement. To presence. To the long, unmarked way around.
Western Rise wasn’t built with a playbook. We scraped by, pouring entire paychecks into early prototypes, living lean so we could build something real. It was built on grit, credit cards, and the hope that there were others out there like me, people who’d seen the other side and couldn’t stomach the script anymore.
And for a while, it worked. We built gear that active guys actually needed. The kind of stuff you could stuff into a backpack, wear for three days, and still look decent enough to talk your way into dinner. We grew slow early, but we grew right, one customer at a time, one country at a time, fueled by the stories people sent us from mountains in Colorado, trains in Thailand, rooftop parties in Lisbon, long dusty roads somewhere in Patagonia.
But nothing stays untouched forever. Not even the good things.
When the pandemic hit, everything changed. Travel stopped. Borders closed. The world shrank. And just like that, we weren’t outfitting movement anymore. We were outfitting stillness. We pivoted, like everyone else. We leaned into comfort. Into lounge. Into work-from-home. And in doing so, we started to become something we never meant to be.
Western Rise, the brand we’d built for misfits and movers, had become another “athleisure” company. Comfy, safe, beige. The irony was brutal. We’d started this thing as a rebellion against that exact life. And now we were selling it.
We didn’t mean to lose the thread. But we did. Slowly. Quietly. One well-meaning product at a time. Bad advice from people that we thought were smarter than us.
Until one day we looked around and realized we were no longer building the future we once dreamed of. We were surviving, not creating. And that’s not good enough.
So we shut it down. Hit pause on everything. No more chasing trends. No more half-hearted drops. We packed up our entire family and moved to Vietnam. Ground zero for global apparel. To get close to the process, to the craft, to the people actually making our gear.
We’re back in Colorado now, but we head back again at the end of August. This work isn’t done.
We spent six months in the dark. Digging through our past, finding the original spark, asking the hard questions. Who are we, really? Who are we for? What’s the point of any of this if it doesn’t make you want to pack a bag and vanish?
We rebuilt from the inside out: fabrics, fits, philosophy, storytelling, systems. Not to make it shinier. But to make it realer. To make it matter.
Because the world doesn’t need more stuff. God knows we’ve all got enough.
It needs more meaning. More motion. More reminders that life is short and weird and best lived with a carry-on and no real plan.
Western Rise 2.0 isn’t a rebrand. It’s a reset.
A gut check. A call back to the reason we started this whole thing in the first place, and maybe the reason you’re still reading this.
If you’ve ever sat in traffic wondering where your life went...
If you’ve ever felt like your clothes were dressing someone else: someone safer, smaller, less you...
If you’ve ever looked up one day and realized you were living a version of success that didn’t even feel like yours…
Same.
And that’s why we had to tear it all down.
To build something that felt like a doorway again. A reason. A reminder. A shove.
So why should you care?
Because you probably don’t need another pair of pants.
But maybe you need a reason to leave.
A reason to move.
A reason to remember who the hell you were before the meetings and the mortgage and the muted urgency of day-to-day life started sanding your edges off.
And if any of that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.
We’re not promising enlightenment.
Just better gear for the road to find it.
So pack light.
Move fast.
And if you see us out there, say hey.
We’ll probably be wearing the same shirt.
— Will
