In the most basic sense, how would you describe Outlier?

The way we really look at it is like we're a renegade materialist company. We're interested in finding and taking the purest, craziest materials we can find and transforming them into really powerful objects, which is what's missing from the market right now. There's a lot of mass stuff out there, and we're just sitting in and building the most quality product that can actually impact how you live on a day to day basis, in a subtle way.

I mean, it's clothing, right? But you know, clothing is everything—you wear it every day. Every person in the world, basically, is wearing it every day, and so it protects you, it communicates something to other people. It restricts you in certain ways and it enables you in certain ways, and so we're trying to build the best possible products that people can [use practically].

In the description on your website, it says “profit should never be the reason a company exists.” You've been around since 2008. So, how do you survive and expand and thrive?

We focus on product. We try to make the best possible thing, and it has to be sold at a positive margin in order for us to survive. We're not sitting there trying to figure out how to squeeze the most money out of it, we're trying to figure out how to finance the next product. This analogy that people use is that it’s like a road trip. If you go on a road trip the goal is not to put as much gas into the car as possible, but you can't run out of gas, right? We wanna have enough gas to get to the next journey, but the journey is the important part.

To me, what it seems like Outlier sells and what's missing from the mass market is convenience. These products just make the way you move through your day simpler.

For us, it's less about convenience and more about removing the subtle restrictions that certain things put on you. Like when you get dressed in one way it codifies you into a certain world view. You're like, "This is what I can do." And physically it does too, often, right? Take a suit and tie. Suits were originally super functional garments—if you break it down it's like a layering system for staying warm and staying clean when people only had two sets of clothing or something—and now it's become kind of a constraining garment for people. We're just kind of tearing those constraints apart and letting you be like, "actually, maybe I got to go and meet with these business people and look this way, but I can also run, jump, whatever, go, turn around and be traveling across the world." I guess convenience is part of that.

It seems like it makes things a lot easier for people who wear it.

Yeah, we want to ultimately make you feel like you can do more, in a very subtle way.