PCT Days IV
Mom(s) to the rescue: 4 years of squirrels, Kulas, dancing and sunbaked tents.
Dearest Kula friends,
Many years ago, I did not have an outdoor gear brand. Many years ago, I was a very miserable person who sat around all day and complained about how ‘bad’ my life was. If it was possible to complain about something, I would have complained about it: my work schedule, my boss, my neighbors, the person who cut me off in traffic, the customer service person who I talked to on the phone… you name it, I could find a reason to make myself suffer about it. But here’s the thing — I had no idea that I was making myself suffer. I thought that ‘everybody else’ was ‘doing it’ to me.
When I had my near death incident about 7 years ago, it was the wake up call that I needed — an open-eye experience of epic proportions that showed me how wrong I had been. All of the people and circumstances out there were not responsible for how I felt inside — I was. UGH. It was one of those moments where I had to swallow a lifetime of complaints … look within… and make a committed decision to learn how to live another way.
When I first had the idea for Kula Cloth, one of my biggest supporters was (and still is) a woman named Diana. Diana somehow found me on my personal blog a few years prior to Kula Cloth — in fact, when I was a railroad police officer, she used to meet me at Golden Gardens (a park in Seattle, WA) and give me fresh eggs from her chickens. We’d sit for an hour or so while I was eating my lunch and I’d share with her my dreams for starting an outdoor company someday. Never ONCE did she tell me I couldn’t do it or that it was ‘foolish’ to leave my ‘stable’ job as a police officer. In fact, when I finally told her about my idea for the intentionally designed pee cloth, she was the first person to cheer me on, “This is going to be huge,” she said.
One day, amidst my first few months of trying to design Kula Cloth, Diana gave me a gift: a map of the Pacific Crest Trail. She looked at me very seriously and said, “You need to go to PCT Days. It’s a festival for hikers and all of the people there need to know about what you’re doing.” I hung her map of the PCT up on my fridge, where it stayed for a few years — a little reminder and a gentle nudge that maybe, one day, if the stars aligned, I could go to PCT Days.
Four years ago, I decided to go — for the first time.
In case you aren’t familiar with it, PCT Days is an annual festival in Cascade Locks, Oregon that celebrates the Pacific Crest Trail. It is a 2 day event where hikers, outdoor organizations and brands converge on a small park for two days of festivities. Kula Cloth is a sponsor of the event, which means that I pay a decent amount of money to set up a booth so that we can share our Kula-goodness with all of the folks who decide to visit.
PCT Days is just a festival, yes … that’s true. But, as the founder of a company and as the creator of a product that created a new segment within the outdoor industry, PCT Days represents something that — at one point in my life — I could not have possibly fathomed. The complaining, miserable railroad cop who saw the world as a very dark place could not have possibly imagined a day when she would be setting up a tent at an outdoor festival to greet the thousands of hikers and visitors in attendance. PCT Days feels like a celebration — it is an opportunity to hug and acknowledge just a few of the many, many people who have made Kula what it is today. It might just be a booth in a field — but not too long ago, that booth was just a map on my fridge — wondering if I’d ever be able to get ‘unstuck’ from where I was.
To celebrate my fourth year at PCT Days — I thought it would be fun to recount some of the experiences from the past few years… they have not all been glitter and unicorns, but I cherish the experiences, nonetheless. Unlike my time at the railroad, I no longer blame the outside world for how I’m feeling inside. That is a landscape of my own design — and I can choose the lens through which I view each of these unique moments in time.
PCT Days I: The Sunbaked Derelict Campsite
I signed up for PCT Days with absolutely zero clue what to expect. I didn’t even have a tent, so I borrowed a very cheap tent from one of my friends’ parents. The tent was sunbaked and very old. I purchased a Kula Cloth banner, and we tried to hang it on the front of the tent, but it didn’t fit right, and it would have blocked all access to the tent, so we ended up zip-tying it to the back of the tent.
I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t have WiFi access, so my entire plan of making custom Kula Cloths would have been completely foiled, except that Morgan, the founder of Blaze Physio, was kind enough to let me filch off her personal cell phone hotspot for nearly the entire event. Instead of making custom Kulas instantly, I had hikers e-mail me their photos. Then, in the evening, I went back to the AirBNB and spent hours designing their Kulas so that they could come back the next day and approve them before we printed them. It was NOT efficient.
It was during this ‘celebration of inefficiency and lack of preparedness’ that I experienced an inexplicably strange and unpredictable moment of weirdness. I was making Kula designs at our AirBNB, I was sitting at a small table when I heard a very ominous THWACK!!!!! outside the window. I looked outside and saw a baby squirrel that had fallen out of a tree… very quickly followed by an adult squirrel that scampered down the tree to look at it. As it looked at the obviously deceased baby squirrel, the adult squirrel proceeded to cry in the most horrific display of animal grief I have ever witnessed in my life. It was very traumatic in an unexpected way (maybe because it was a squirrel?). Either way — it felt like it added to the somewhat chaotic experience of PCT Days I.
In another mis-calculation, Aaron and I were the only people from Kula Cloth who attended PCT Days — incorrectly believing that having two people in a booth would be ‘enough’. I was wrong — very wrong. Our booth was so slammed with visitors, that we barely had the chance to take bathroom breaks or eat… and when we did, we were sprinting back and forth.
Amidst the overwhelming chaos of the event — where we indeed felt like imposters who had snuck into an event for ‘real’ brands — there were so many moments where hikers sought me out to tell me how much the product had changed their life. It was meaningful and special, and will forever be my first time with a tent at an event — and you only ever get that first time once. It was memorable, ridiculous, and we somehow managed to pull it off — even if we did stab the tent with a knife on the last day and completely ruin it (and subsequently purchased a new one for my friend’s parents).
PCT Days II: Help has arrived
PCT days in 2022, was much easier… because not only did I have a real rent that made me look like an actual brand… but we arrived with help. A year after our first attempt, I had hired a few employees, and I arrived with reinforcements to help run the booth.
We stayed at an oddly quirky AirBNB that was located on a large piece of land. The host for the AirBNB lived on site, and must have smoked a lot of pot, because our half of the large home smelled permanently of pot smoke.
The event was busy, but we got to take more breaks. It was my first time as a ‘boss’ of employees — and it felt like such a fun treat to stay at a nice AirBNB and to take them all out to dinner each night.
PCT Days III: A Blank Space
I’m going to leave this third year as a bit of a blank. I will suffice it to say that this was, without a doubt, the most challenging year at PCT Days for me. I was having some issues with an employee that were very complicated, and it caused a lot of havoc for me as a supervisor and as a human.
What I did learn was this: It is not my responsibility to change what I do to appease everybody, and I can still have a good time and enjoy myself amidst other folks being triggered. Melissa Urban once filmed a video about boundaries that included the phrase, “Your disapproval is not my responsibility.” This has become one of my favorite phrases — not to give to others, but rather to use when I need to remind myself that it is not my responsibility to control or manage other people’s reactions or emotions.
I have always struggled with being a bit of a people pleaser — trying my best to make sure that everybody is happy… usually at my own expense. When I go to PCT Days every single year, it really does feel like the ‘apex’ of everything that I’ve worked for. Day in and day out I have busted my ass (pardon my language) to make Kula Cloth what it is today. There is not one person alive who has worked as hard as I have to make this possible — and PCT Days gives me the chance to celebrate the countless days of my life that I have devoted to making a product real. As I watched somebody else attempt to sabotage my experience in 2023, I promised myself that I would not let anybody else take that experience away from me. I promised myself that I would continue to celebrate everything that I’ve accomplished. I am the one in control of how I feel, and I can choose to focus on the hundreds of people who showed up at the event to say hello and tell me how much they love Kula — not the one person who didn’t.
PCT DAYS IV: Moms save the day
Ok… this brings me to THIS YEAR. My FOURTH PCT Days ever, and, I think … my favorite year so far. A few weeks prior to the event, I learned that I’d be short staffed. So, I did what any 43 year old woman would do: I called my mom and asked her to show up and save the day. Without hesitation, my mom bought a plane ticket to Oregon to come help at the event. In addition to my mom, my employee Chizuko recruited her two college-age daughters to help work at the event. Together: the two moms saved the day.
This year, it just felt like everything clicked into place. Well, except for the fact that I forgot my branded tablecloths and had to stop at Party City to buy some cheap ones. But, other than that — we had the dream team at the event. Chizuko’s daughters were… in a word… remarkable. They instantly figured out how to work the digital ‘cash register’ on my phone… and they made and designed custom Kulas at lightning speed. My mom and Chizuko explained the product to booth visitors and even applied temporary creepy cat tattoos.
On day two of PCT Days, I somehow got roped into a DANCE OFF with Rob from Granite Gear. This was the poster that advertised the event to hikers:
The dance off was probably the highlight of the event for me — just imagine about a hundred people all standing in a circle cheering on dancing hikers in the middle. To be honest, I thought Rob should have won the dance off — he flopped on the ground like a seal in the middle of his dance routine and somehow the wrong song was played for me, so I didn’t quite get the ‘vibe’ that I wanted — BUT, the event was really silly and fun and it brought a lot of people together to do something that I love very much: DANCE. It also reminds me that there needs to be more dancing in this world. When people get together and dance, there is not much that we don’t all have in common. It, truly, feels like the best celebration.
Usually, we empty out the booth for the day around 5 or 6 pm on Saturday… and then drive back to event site to remove the tent on Sunday morning… but this year was different. A huge storm with thunder and lightning was predicted — plus, very high winds. Last year, the Altra Running tent ended up doing a backflip into the Columbia River and needing to get pulled out by fishermen. As the clouds became more ominous, and lightning could be seen in the distance — our small team worked frantically to tear down our entire tent and then hand-carry everything back to my car so that we wouldn’t risk losing the tent in the wind.
Once everything was down, we met up with Mallory from Youer and Jen from Alpine Fit for dinner and spent the next couple of hours talking ‘shop’ and laughing. Jen’s employee Jamie asked a fun question, “What was your favorite memory from today?”
I had to think for a moment, because it was hard to pick just one.... but there was one really sweet conversation that happened when a man showed up at our booth with a laminated photo of a backpack that had two Kulas snapped to it: a mini Kula and a normal sized Kula. He explained to us that we had sent a mini Kula to a mom who was just helping her 4 year old daughter get started with hiking. He was so excited to show us the photo and to tell us that the little girl was so proud about having her very own Kula Cloth. We asked for the girl’s name… and then, unbeknownst to this man, we made her a custom mini Kula Cloth with her name on it. We found him later on during the event to present him with the mini Kula to give to her and the look on his face was priceless.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been going to the same event each year for the past four years. And it’s also hard to believe how much Kula has ‘grown up’ in the time that we’ve been attending. At our very first event, I questioned whether or not we even belonged there. Two years ago, I had an idea that seemed a bit ambitious … I decided that we would make custom Kula Cloths for every single solitary vendor at the event. This year, that included over 90 vendors. This means that each year, we design 90 original designs and print 2 Kulas of each design to give to the other attendees at the show. The first year that we started doing this, I wondered what people would think — but they loved them. This year, I had the opportunity to wander around the event with my mom giving out the Kulas. When you are walking up to a booth of people — and particularly when they are all men — you have to use the right approach, and mine is something like this:
“Hey!! It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for ALL YEAR!!! It’s the moment when Kula Cloth stops by to drop off your custom pee cloths that I’ve designed by illegally pulling your logo from the internet without asking anybody for permission.”
And this year — do you know what happened? Most people stopped me before I even made it through the sentence, and they said things like, “This IS MY FAVORITE part of the event!” or “We LOVE the custom Kulas!!” or “My wife looks forward to these every single year!”.
As we walked up to booth after booth… every single person knew what a Kula Cloth was. I was stunned. Maybe the former sun-baked derelict campsite brand was a little bit more grown up than I realized.
On the last day, I stopped and looked around the whole event — I had just finished competing in a ‘dance off’ with Rob from Granite Gear … and I could see the Kula tent in the distance. My mom was busy applying a temporary tattoo to a hiker… Chizuko was explaining the Kula Cloth to a curious event-goer … and Chizuko’s daughters were busy helping customers design custom Kulas. My husband was in the back of the tent, starting to sort through our inventory and planning to make our exit from the event prior to the impending thunderstorm. I thought back to my life less than a decade ago — and just how much things had changed. How did I get so lucky? A somewhat smelly PCT hiker bumped into me as I was standing there, feeling sentimental… “Hey, aren’t you the Kula Cloth lady?” I laughed back as I nodded, “I am!”. The hiker looked at me with big eyes, “Kula Cloth changed my life on the trail. I just want you to know that.” I looked around again at everything that surrounded me — all of the people and things that I really, really love, “It’s changed my life too”, I said. And I really meant it.
Friends — thank you SO MUCH for being here, and if you came out to PCT Days, thank you so much for stopping by to say hello. The entire weekend felt like a blur, but I want you to know how much I truly appreciate each and every one of you. And, a particular thank you to my mom, Chizuko, Chizuko’s daughters and my husband Aaron who held down the fort and really made the weekend feel as special as it was.
I hope that all of you have a really beautiful week — you are loved!
I could not have enjoyed the event more! Witnessing how Kula Cloth and the Kula community literally and figuratively “touch” people’s lives is really something to be proud of…and I’m certainly proud of you 💜
This post made me smile so big the whole time! I love watching Kula (and you!) grow over the years. Thank you so much for your open heart and soul. <3