Hunter Harlow. Photo courtesy of Sendero.

Sendero Provisions Co. founder and CEO Hunter Harlow’s Waco, Texas apparel company is at an inflection point.

The company’s notched 100% year-over-year growth since 2018. It’s also finding newfound success in women’s aided by the hiring of a former Ralph Lauren designer with denim expertise in Jenny Passavant and, more recently bringing on talent previously from Brixton in Mike Lawson and Byron Bergsto. It’s been a maturation of a brand that originally had been pegged into the outdoor space, but is now seeing interest across a broad base of retailers looking for newness.

“We like telling cool stories and finding people who share our same mindset of being outside and being adventurous with a little bit of irreverence. It’s just wild sometimes. I can’t believe we’re seeing interest from New York boutiques and random skate shops in the Midwest, to women’s-exclusive stores, Western saddle shops, and surf stores.”

The trick now is to balance the incoming demand while staying true to what got Sendero to this point – a brand built by geology majors who drew inspiration from their desert sabbaticals in the Southwest for designs and colorways on patches, T-shirts, and bandanas.

Category and international growth are in the plans over the next three to five years. In the near-term, Sendero will see its first brick-and-mortar location open in downtown Waco in the next few months.

The under 1,000-square-foot store will be located at the upscale Hotel Herringbone’s Shops at Herringbone. The Shops counts more than 12 tenants and is about five minutes from Sendero’s warehouse. The upcoming store will serve as a lab to test product and hear directly from Sendero shoppers.

Sendero got its start in the outdoor market, but has since gained traction across retail segments. Photo courtesy of Sendero

New Talent, New Perspectives

As Harlow tells it, it’s been a wild ride to get Sendero to this point.

Growth accelerated after the 2018 rebrand and restructure, when Harlow’s original business partner and founder Aaron Bryant parted ways with the company and Sendero rebranded. The latter refined the brand’s market positioning as a lifestyle business, moving it away from simply identifying as only an outdoor brand.

Last year, the company entered the women’s market with a full collection for spring and the business is now the fastest-growing segment for Sendero.

“It’s fun because my 21-year-old geology-self never would have dreamed I’d be sitting here providing commentary on what’s in for women’s fashion,” Harlow said.

Those strides to solidify the business helped prepare it for new talent, including names from the action sports industry that are now unlocking retail relationships.

Lawson, the former Brixton vice president of sales for North America, joined Sendero in October as an equity partner and CCO. Lawson has also been at Salomon as a national sales manager and Sole Technology as a sales manager for the Altamont Apparel and Emerica divisions.

Bergsto joined more recently in January as Sendero sales and retail marketing manager. The sales veteran previously served as U.S. sales manager at Brixton and, prior to that, was at Vans.

Last January Sendero Provisions counted a dozen total employees. As of late March of this year, the headcount stood at 42 and Harlow said they’re still hiring across the business, including merchandising, marketing, e-commerce, and wholesale.

“It’s all growing. Sometimes, as a first-time business owner, that could be scary, but it’s also massively humbling that people want to be here,” the CEO said. “I feel an immense pressure to keep Sendero going in the most authentic, clear fashion that I can.”

The wholesale business surpassed e-commerce a couple years ago and is now “well above” the direct business. The past two years have been spent strengthening and maturing the business’ infrastructure to accommodate the growth. That’s included business management and commerce software and operational tightening.

So far, the business has been self-funded with no outside investment. Harlow said raising money could be a consideration in the future but, for now, Sendero has been able to manage on its own.

Sendero designs often reference or draw inspiration from Harlow’s geology studies at Baylor. Photo courtesy of Sendero

Bridging the Natural World and Fashion

Direct-to-consumer was the channel that understood Sendero’s mishmash of the old American West and vintage landscapes from the start.

Initially, it was a bit of a tough sell getting retailers to understand the brand beyond labeling it as a Western outdoor label that draws its name from the Spanish word for path or trail.

“Our DTC (channel) always understood that (brand story), so we never had trouble there,” Harlow said. “California is one of our biggest markets in e-commerce and so is Colorado. So slowly as we started learning how to tell our story, along with the demand we had in the DTC world, retailers caught on quick. We honestly let the marketplace bridge that gap for us.”

Today, Sendero’s Western-inspired fashion features prints that aren’t far from Harlow’s geology studies at Baylor: National Park references, T-rex fossil designs on T-shirts, and an ammonite patch are a few examples.

“I think about (geology) daily,” he said. “My dissertation was in the Four Corners region and so I spent a ton of time out there and that left a strong impression on me and a large part of Sendero’s design aesthetic was pulled from that time out there in the outdoor setting and the people. Without that, Sendero wouldn’t be where it is today.”

Over the next three years, Harlow and team plan to focus on category expansion to offer choice to wholesale partners. The five-year plan calls for more global growth. In Canada, where the company already has a presence, it’s now in talks with a Canadian third-party logistics provider. Sendero hopes to then launch in Australia as early as the back half of this year, with several other countries also identified for future distribution.

Harlow and team see the brand’s unique point of view as a key advantage.

“There’s a big push for unique stories and authenticity in the marketplace right now and Sendero is that,” Harlow said. “We pride ourselves on that and that’s almost exclusively what we’ve been focused on over the last five years.”