Kurt Gray puts the outdoor industry plainly: "North Face doesn't make anything. They don't even own a sewing machine."
That isn't an accusation. It's how the business works — big brands design gear, factories overseas build it. Jagged Edge Mountain Gear went the other way.
It began in Telluride in the early 1990s, when twin sisters sewed fleece headbands and sold them from a pushcart on Main Street. It grew into regional stores and a national catalog business, then came apart in the early 2000s. The trademark was sold, and the brand was, in owner-operator Erik Dalton's words, "shuttered and put on a shelf." Dalton took over the Telluride store in 2003; getting the name back took about ten years.
The sewing happens in Montrose, slowly and on purpose. "We hand cut everything that we make," Dalton says — roughly fifty steps per pack, and the first is a person with a pattern and a blade.
Gray, who spent years designing outerwear and visiting Asian factories, says the economics there run backward: cloth is the expensive input and labor is cheap, so the system is built to save fabric. That has a consequence most buyers never see — the factory often picks the materials, so the lining that failed in your pack may not have been chosen by the brand on the label.
The hardest constraint is people. Finding someone locally who can sew, Dalton says, is "like finding literally a needle in a haystack." Gray says. The shop runs with about four people.
One machine on their floor tells the region's story. Their die-cutting press came from SOM Footwear, which handmade Vibram-soled shoes in Montrose for over a decade before Softstar Shoes of Philomath, Oregon bought it in 2025. The shoemaking moved north. The press stayed, and now cuts backpack straps.
Geyser Systems
In the second half, KVNF freelance reporter Lisa Young visits Geyser Systems, a Montrose manufacturer that gave up a product line and its entire production crew, then rebuilt around 3D-printed portable shower systems — the Geyser Clean Kit, and the Geyser Field Shower Kit developed for military use.
Founder Jonathan Ballesteros describes what a military stock number would demand: more sewing machines, more table space, more 3D printers, more people.
