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Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Sasquatch Cookies Deliver Homemade Treats With BigFoot

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Sasquatch Cookies

Food & Beverage

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Website: www.sasquatchcookies.com

Brooke Orist started Sasquatch Cookies in 2017 with eight recipes and a simple premise: freshly baked cookies delivered to your door by someone in a Bigfoot costume.

Making a hard pivot from her previous career in the nonprofit world, she baked cookies in a commissary kitchen before opening her first location in downtown Colorado Springs in 2020, followed by two more in 2022, including the walk-up “Baby Sasquatch” at Red Leg Brewing Company.

Orist was drawn to Sasquatch as a brand as she sought a nomadic theme and says the company leaves “good footprints” by donating 10 percent of profits to the Springs Rescue Mission. A local seamstress makes the costume bodies.

The company took off in a big way in 2020. “We went from very small, like doing 20 orders a night, to doing like 500 orders a day,” Orist says. “I still see it growing, which is really encouraging.”

The menu has included more than 100 varieties over the years, with a core catalog of 11 cookies and a pair of rotating recipes every week. “Our most popular is the s’mores one,” Orist says of the latter. “Everybody loves the s’mores.”

Orders range from a half-dozen to 10,000 cookies for Amazon, as the employee count ranges from 30 to 70, depending on the season. Delivery by Sasquatch, which was initially the only way to get the cookies, is now a $25 upcharge and about 30 percent of the business.

Looking back, Orist says the operation is surpassing her expectations. “I am astounded,” she says. “I knew I didn’t want this to be like a hobby business, I didn’t want it to be a side hustle. I knew I wanted it to become my career, to make it into something.

“It’s amazing how it all worked out,” she adds. “We have three stores now. When I originally made a plan for what I hoped to see, I said I hoped to have six stores eventually.”

And while she might look to Castle Rock or Fountain for the next location, Colorado Springs has proven to be a fertile market. “Down here, everyone has an ‘I believe in Sasquatch’ sticker on their car,” she laughs.

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Capella Space’s High-Resolution Satellites

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Capella Space

Aerospace & Aircraft

Louisville, Colorado

Website: www.capellaspace.com

While Capella Space is headquartered in San Francisco, the company planted its manufacturing flag in Boulder County within a year of its founding in 2016.

The first company in the U.S. to commercialize synthetic aperture radar (SAR), Capella launched its first prototype in 2018. That was followed in 2020 by Capella-2, a satellite capable of producing the world’s highest-resolution commercial SAR imagery, primarily for applications in defense and disaster response.

It’s all about seeing the 75 percent of the planet that’s under the dark of night or cover of clouds or smoke at any given time. “We design, build and operate our own satellites, and those satellites can image the Earth through rain, smoke, clouds, daytime, nighttime,” says Mack Koepke, Capella’s VP of global sales and marketing. “Our satellite systems send a radio signal to Earth, and that radio signal bounces back from Earth to our satellite system. Depending on how that radio signal interacts with what it touches on Earth, you start to gain a picture of what is going on, on Earth.”

There’s a reason the startup immediately looked to establish manufacturing in Colorado. “It was such a rich pool of talent that we frankly just couldn’t pass up,” Koepke says. “We really wanted to ensure that we had a footprint here in Colorado to leverage the excellent workforce that comes out of places like the University of Colorado, as well as some of the legacy aerospace companies that we have, like Ball Aerospace, Lockheed and others.”

The company, which has raised more than $200 million in venture capital to date, has expanded its Colorado facility twice and now occupies a 32,000-square-foot space in Louisville with about 50 employees.

“This larger facility allows us to actually increase the throughput and volume of satellites that we manufacture,” Koepke says. “With this newer facility, we’re actually going to be able to build at least one a month.” With a dozen satellites in orbit as of late 2023, Capella could double its constellation in a year at that rate.

Koepke says Capella eschews slow and methodical protocol in favor of a nimbler design and manufacturing model. “That allows us to take a clean sheet of paper, design a satellite system, and go all the way to production and actually build one of those systems in a really short amount of time,” he explains. “For us, a clean sheet to an operational satellite system can be 12 to 18 months, whereas on a legacy system, that might be on a timeline of seven to 10 years.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): AtmosZero’s Industrial Boilers

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

AtmosZero

Energy & Environment

Fort Collins, Colorado

Website: www.atmoszero.energy 

Based at the Powerhouse Energy Campus at Colorado State University, AtmosZero’s Boiler 2.0 is an industrial boiler that’s at least twice as efficient as the market norm today.

Things have moved quickly since COO Ashwin Salvi co-founded AtmosZero with CEO Addison Stark and CTO Todd Bandhauer in 2021. The company emerged from stealth mode with a prototype system in 2023 and is now manufacturing the first industrial-scale system in Fort Collins for New Belgium Brewing, with installation slated for 2024. The plan calls for more custom installations in the U.S. and Europe through 2025 and a low-volume product in 2026.

“The company is really motivated by the frustration that we have with the notion that the industrial sector, the manufacturing sector, it’s hard to decarbonize,” Salvi says. “But when you dig into it — and this is Addison’s insight — 75 percent of the energy that’s consumed by the industrial sector just goes to making heat, and that’s like hot air, hot water or steam.”

The generation of heat is responsible for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, he adds, and AtmosZero sees a path to drastically reducing that number via its heat pump technology. “We’re sourcing heat from ambient air as well as sourcing energy from electricity, then combining that together to be able to provide the same amount of heat output as these competitive, comparable boilers, but in a much more cost-effective way because we’re consuming half the electricity that today’s electric resistance boilers consume.”

Brewing is a big target market for Boiler 2.0, but Salvi notes that steam is used in a wide range of manufacturing sectors, from food and beverage to petrochemicals, not to mention municipal systems in major cities. “Almost every industry uses it,” he says. “We’re building a system that can now scale across all these different industries.”

At about 20 employees and growing, AtmosZero leverages a network of contract manufacturers along the Front Range to supplement its in-house capabilities, with an assist from students at CSU.

“We’re looking at manufacturing based in Colorado because we have access to these great minds, these great workforces, and the skill sets that these workforces add in terms of welding pressure vessels and building big, industrial-scale things,” Salvi says. “That’s what these industries do, and that’s what we want to benefit from.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Subterranean Boring Cuts Through Solid Ground

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Subterranean Boring Inc.

Industrial

Golden, Colorado

Website: www.subterraneanboring.com

Founded by Stu Blattner in 1980 and now owned by his nephew, Jesse Blattner, Subterranean Boring Inc. (SBI) makes tools that tunnel through earth and rock. The company uses its own line of equipment, manufactured in-house by subsidiary Golden Machining Solutions (GMS), to excavate circular raisebores, vertical or diagonal shafts cut through solid ground, without explosives.

With about 20 employees each, the two companies occupy a single 100,000-square-foot facility in Golden. GMS pursues outside contract manufacturing jobs, with SBI as its primary customer. SBI is focused on contract boring, and also sells its tools to an international market.

A reamer holds several cutters to excavate holes from 28 inches to 18 feet. One that SBI used to excavate a 20-foot-wide borehole had about 40 cutters, Tuell says.

Each carbide-studded cutter is built for durability and reliability. “There’s over 100 parts that make up the cutter assembly, and that’s not including the carbide — each cutter has roughly 180 pieces of carbide,” Tuell says. “It’s all pretty specialized material. We’ve got a source for forgings from here, the bar stock for the shaft from another company, the carbide from another company.

“They all have to get sent out for heat treating to get the right hardness and the right durability. Then they come back and get re-machined, and then we have a whole assembly area where we assemble the cutters, test the cutters and press the carbide in. It’s quite the operation.”

The market is centered on mines and big civil construction projects, including water tunnels for reservoirs. “Primarily, it’s used in mines for ore passes and ventilation holes,” Tuell says. “I can’t even count how many holes we’ve done up at Henderson Mine here in Colorado.”

Manufacturing its own cutters, reamers and raisebore machines is a competitive advantage for SBI as a contractor, he adds. “We’re able to control the cost a lot more, whereas most of the competitors out there in raiseboring have to go to a supplier for cutters.”

As SBI’s market is very much international, the company’s proximity to Denver International Airport is a big plus. “We’ve got a great airport here so it makes it very easy for us to move people not only around the country, but the world,” Tuell says.

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): BioBUBBLE’s 38 Year Journey

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

BioBUBBLE

Medical

Fort Collins, Colorado

Website: www.biobubble.com

Chuck Spengler started bioBUBBLE in 1985 to bring a soft-sided cleanroom to the research market and soon relocated the company to Northern Colorado. “He came up with the simple method to filter the air and fit the needs of those studies for those purposes, whether it’s protecting the study itself or protecting users,” says Dylan Miller, bioBUBBLE’s sales and design manager.

“We can basically take an empty warehouse or in a larger empty room and create separate spaces within that room that would allow you to potentially run two different and concurrent studies, or just to provide some level of environmental separation for whatever that need is.”

Much of the market has recently gravitated to benchtop biocontainment enclosures for research and pharmaceutical development applications that don’t require an entire room. “We are able to provide essentially a more customized and cheaper option to some of the larger biosafety cabinets that are out there,” Miller says. “Really, it’s just scale. Our materials are extremely modular and easy to manipulate, so we can do a wide variety of sizes with the same principle.

“Our big thing is the user’s ability to interact with the equipment,” he adds. “We have a lot more control over the size of openings, where they can be and things like that, and that just allows us to give the customer a more tailored product.”

The 13-employee company is based out of a 10,000-square-foot facility. After the design phase, bioBUBBLE cuts vinyl on an automated table and uses RF welding and heat sealing to create walls. The company relies on a contract manufacturer for metal parts for HEPA filters.

During the pandemic, bioBUBBLE helped UCLA and Cornell University establish COVID-19 testing systems, expanding the company’s skill set and catalyzing growth. “There were a lot of unique projects coming out of that, and that started to help us gain more traction, especially in the automation space,” Miller says.

 

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Snaptron’s Tactile Metal Dome Switches

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Snaptron

Electronics & IT

Windsor, Colorado

Website: www.snaptron.com

Whether you know what they are or not, tactile metal dome switches are ubiquitous in modern life. They’re the little round switches that flex on and off in everything from videogame systems to helicopter cockpits.

Founded by the late Earl Tatman in his garage in 1990, Snaptron now makes more than 100 million tactile dome switches a year at its 44,000-square-foot plant in Windsor. The company boomed in its early years as a key supplier to a few big brands. “Jobs for the Xbox and Palm Pilot turned into really high-volume things and drove the company’s growth in the ‘90s,” says Ashley Steinbach, Snaptron’s director of strategic development.

Steinbach says the 65-employee company’s largest markets are defense, aviation, automotive and consumer electronics. “We’re fairly diverse, with a lot of different industries and applications,” she notes.

There is increasing demand for solutions that align with manufacturing automation, with rolls of switches that can be fed into pick-and-place machines. “A lot of companies have been doing SMT [surface-mount technology], which is automatic placement and using robotics and other things to automate their manufacturing processes, so we’re seeing a big uptick on our side,” Steinbach says.

Another new dome, the NC-Series, is named for an acronym for “normally closed,” Steinbach says. “Most domes that are produced are considered normally open, that they’re not making any sort of electrical contacts, whereas the [NC-Series] has a feature on it that allows it to remain in contact until it is actuated, at which point it activates another electrical point. So it’s a dual-feature switch that remains on. You kind of think of it like an emergency stop button where it’s constantly being held down.”

Colorado’s lifestyle and location are major pluses for Snaptron, as is the presence of Denver International Airport. “Having the ability to get anywhere in the U.S. is great for our sales team to really form one-on-one, day-to-day relationships with our customers,” Steinbach says. “That’s definitely been a big benefit.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Colorado Bushcraft’s Retro-Style Outdoor Bags

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Colorado Bushcraft’s retro-style outdoor bags

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Colorado Bushcraft

Apparel & Gear

Golden, Colorado

Website: www.coloradobushcraft.com

Colorado Bushcraft product photo under a tree.

A self-described “computers” guy by day, Mitchell Sprinsky launched Colorado Bushcraft as a side hustle after suffering sticker shock while shopping for ultralight hiking and camping gear. He bought a 1920s-era Singer sewing machine from Ralph’s Power Sewing Machine in Denver and started making round-bottomed bucket bags and organizers. Hikers took note when they encountered Sprinsky on the Colorado Trail and other hiking routes, and he started selling his wares in 2015.

The designs are often based on gear from the 1800s. “I spent a lot of time at the Golden Pioneer Museum, looking at, ‘What did people use when they came here?’” Sprinsky says. “How do I make these things but put a little bit of modern touch on it so that they’re useful and they’ll just last forever?”

It follows that Sprinsky sticks with time-tested materials like waxed canvas and Scottish tartan wool to craft a wide variety of bags and pouches, ground covers, koozies and notebooks. However, he has swapped out his old Singer for a pair of modern sewing machines.

Colorado Bushcraft has moved into packs with a contract cut-and-sew operation in Commerce City, but Sprinsky says he prefers being in complete control of the manufacturing himself. “Most of the stuff — like 80 percent of what I sell — I make myself, so nothing ever looks the same,” he notes. “I’m not gonna say it’s perfect, but it’s rustic in a good way.”

Sprinsky also manufactures goods for private-label customers on a contract basis, and he even made some cowboy bedrolls that landed on prime time. “Those actually became famous,” he says. “They’re all the cowboy bedrolls used in the ‘Yellowstone’ TV series.”

While he’s nearing retirement from his day job, Sprinsky isn’t quite ready to stop with Colorado Bushcraft. But that doesn’t mean he wants to grow it much beyond what he can sew on his own. “At times, it becomes overwhelming,” Sprinsky says, citing a curve of “selling 10 things a month to selling hundreds of things a month” since the startup. “To go bigger means I have to do what I did with the new pack: outsource. And my brain just doesn’t work that way.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): Autonomous Tent’s Movable Five-Star Hotels

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

Autonomous Tent Co.

Home & Lifestyle

Denver, CO

Website: https://www.autonomoustent.com/

Autonomous Tent Co. sunset picture of interior.

Inspired by the soaring coastal designs of late architect Harry Gesner, Phil Parr launched Autonomous Tent to build the world’s first movable five-star hotels in 2013.

Ranging from 380 to 580 square feet, the customizable tents have evolved as Parr iterated the design and manufacturing model over the decade. With a polycarbonate frame, the company’s prototype tent was installed on the West Bijou Ranch east of Denver in 2013. Parr moved to a steel frame when Treebones Resort in Big Sur, California, became the first paying customer in 2015.

Now with more than a dozen installations from Wyoming to New Zealand, the company experimented with wood and aluminum before gravitating back to steel frames, now fabricated by Monarch Metal Manufacturing in Denver.

“Monarch has been just an amazing partner,” Parr says, noting that the learning curve for both companies has required patience and persistence. “You can sit and draw these parts for months, but until you actually make them and you’re out there in the field and you’re assembling them and you see how things fit together do you see things from a different perspective.”

The minimum budget is usually around $100,000 for an installation, and Autonomous Tent sells the frame and fabric for $60,000. The “vast majority” of inquiries come from resorts and other commercial operations.

Parr continues to work on new designs and is bullish on a model due for release in 2024 with amenities for watching wildlife and stargazing.

“We’re working on a new concept where it has a retractable roof over the bedroom and a rooftop deck over the living room,” he says. “The original idea was that it’d be portable and transportable and you could set it up in a day or two, and that just hasn’t been the case with that original design. It takes a couple of weeks to set it up. But there are so many opportunities where, if we could set up a structure in a day and take it down in a day and easily ship it, it would open up a lot of other doors.”

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Made in Colorado (Fall 2023) — Bison Leather Goods, biodegradable hemp clothing and more

All Made In Colorado’s winners and finalists have at least one thing in common: They all make products in Colorado. 

It underlines the sheer breadth of the products made in Colorado. While the Colorado manufacturing base is not as established as places like the Rust Belt and the Southeast, it is also unconstrained by tradition and underpinned by innovation.  

And that might be exactly what the domestic industry needs as it rides a winning streak fueled by the return of manufacturing from China and other overseas locales — no matter whether it lands in Detroit or Steamboat Springs, Colorado. 

Coleman’s Haberdashery — Bison Leather Goods 

Steamboat Springs, CO

Website: www.colemanshaberdashery.com

Coleman’s Haberdashery — Bison Leather Goods

Vince Coleman took up leatherwork as a hobby after working in the restaurant industry, then went pro with Coleman’s Haberdashery in 2016. “I was burned out and ready for a career change after doing it for 21 years,” Coleman says. “I stumbled across bison hides. The reason I chose those was because of the durability initially: They have 40 percent greater tensile strength than traditional cowhide.” 

Sourcing the hides largely from bison ranches on the Western Slope, Coleman and his wife, Gretchen, hand-stitch wallets, tote bags, belts and other products, and back them with a lifetime guarantee. 

The shop also makes a variety of products for ski resorts, distilleries and guest ranches. “When COVID hit, we transitioned, business model-wise, more into the wholesale and private-label side of things,” Coleman says. After the summer season, the operation takes on custom projects ranging from notebooks to chaps. 

COST: Starts at $29 retail.

Deerhammer Distillery Trail Forge 

Buena Vista, CO

Website: www.deerhammer.com

Deerhammer Distillery Trail Forge bottle of Whisky

A graphic designer turned distiller, Lenny Eckstein changed careers when he launched Deerhammer Distillery in Buena Vista in 2012. As craft distilling took off in Colorado, Eckstein saw an opportunity. “It blew my mind with what could happen with whiskey on a small scale,” he says. The career move opened up “an outlet for creativity I couldn’t get sitting in front of a computer all the time.” 

Production has grown from about a barrel a month to almost a barrel a day. Deerhammer has focused on single-malt whiskey since day one, but Eckstein says he likes the opportunity to experiment.  

Case in point: In 2018, Deerhammer partnered with Eddyline Brewing in Buena Vista to distill 10,000 gallons of the brewery’s surplus Crank Yanker IPA into Trail Forge. The third release came out in spring 2023, and Eckstein has six more barrels aging for future releases. Proceeds go to a good cause: To date, it’s raised about $30,000 for trails in the Buena Vista area. 

COST: $85 retail 

h clothing co 

Colorado Springs, CO

Website: www.hclothingco.com

H1

While working on his MBA, Alex Jackson learned some “dark truths” of the textile industry’s sustainability, or lack thereof. In response, he started h clothing co to make durable, biodegradable hemp clothing. 

A self-taught sewist who works as a business analyst by day, Jackson makes every shirt, dress, pants and shorts by hand himself. “YouTube is a hell of a resource if you know what you’re looking for,” he laughs. “I’d purchased a sewing machine some years earlier to start doing some leatherwork. “I sewed my first shirt in 2020 in early COVID, and everything just kind of blew up from there.” 

The h clothing lifetime guarantee is basically ironclad: Jackson will repair and restitch any garment he sells. “I want the clothing I make to be out there as long as possible. I always see these as lifelong items.” 

COST: $80 to $250 retail.

Trash Panda Disc Golf 

Denver, CO

Website: www.trashpandadiscgolf.com 

Trash Panda Disc Golf: Blue disc

Jesse Stedman started playing disc golf in 2008 when he was a freshman in high school. “I thought to myself, ‘This is an outdoor sport that depends on plastic production, so where’s the recycled plastic?’” he remembers. “There was really none.” 

A dozen years and many rounds of disc golf later, a layoff at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic led Stedman to pursue the idea with Trash Panda. For the first two years, Stedman made the discs, each of them stamped with a “Recycled in Colorado” tag, himself. “I built an injection-molding machine in my garage,” he says. “That’s how I did it for two years.” 

In 2022, he turned to a Denver-area contract manufacturer to boost production with industrial-scale injection-molding machines and meet demand. “I made 5,000 products by hand before we scaled, and those were literally one at a time on that injection machine,” Stedman says. 

COST: Discs $17 to $22 retail. 

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]

Made in Colorado (Summer 2023) — Beer Can Art, Surfboard Wax and More

All Made In Colorado’s winners and finalists have at least one thing in common: They all make products in Colorado. 

It underlines the sheer breadth of the products made in Colorado. While the Colorado manufacturing base is not as established as places like the Rust Belt and the Southeast, it is also unconstrained by tradition and underpinned by innovation.  

And that might be exactly what the domestic industry needs as it rides a winning streak fueled by the return of manufacturing from China and other overseas locales — no matter whether it lands in Detroit or Kremmling, Colorado. 

5280 Beer Can Art 

Aurora, CO

www.5280beercanart.com 

Beercan1

A high school choir teacher by day, Aaron Jaramillo started turning beer cans into art in 2019. He made a Colorado flag for his brother as a Christmas gift, then “the ball kind of got rolling,” he says. 

That’s a bit of an understatement: As of March 2023, he’s made more than 700 artworks from cans, about four a week in the years since he started. Jaramillo collects, cleans, flattens, and sorts cans by color, then uses a router and a staple gun to craft his wares. He makes more Colorado flag art than anything else, but also takes on custom projects and has delivered cornhole sets to several Denver Broncos players. 

Jaramillo says he was inspired by Peter 4:10 in the Bible: “It essentially says, ‘Use your gifts that God has given you in service of others,’ which is the main reason I am doing this.” 

COST: $25 to $150 retail. Cornhole sets $450. 

Buddies Outdoor Gear Surfboard Wax 

Littleton, CO

https://www.buddiesoutdoorgear.com/

Buddies

Landin Goloja surfed waves all over the world before getting “hooked” on the thrill of surfing rivers in Colorado. “I started river surfing when I moved out here five years ago, and I started beekeeping the other year as well,” he says. “I kind of put the two together making my own surfboard wax.” 

Goloja started using beeswax from his backyard hive and other beekeepers on the Front Range to make biodegradable surfboard wax. “That wax ultimately rubs off the board overuse and gets into the rivers, lakes, and oceans,” he says. 

Goloja sees the wax as the first product of many. “Currently, I’m prototyping river surfing fins as well, for the bottom of surfboards,” he says. “We’re looking to collaborate with other local companies as much as possible and increase the community of river surfing through some good products.” 

COST: $5.50 retail

Available online and at The Edge Ski Saddle and Pack in Pueblo. 

Tune Outdoor Campers 

Denver, Colorado

www.tuneoutdoor.com

Tune2

Outdoor industry veteran Sean Kepler co-founded Tune Outdoor with designers Kris Arnold and Ryan Bricker in 2020.  

After more than two years of R&D, the company launched the Tune M1 camper in early 2023. “What’s out there are heavier slide-ins and lightweight, wedge-tent frame campers, and we tried to bring the two together by doing a framed pop-up that provides dramatically more space inside than the wedges,” says Kepler. “It just feels immensely more spacious than the other campers that are out there right now.” 

Tune builds the campers with “very innovative manufacturing techniques” in a 29,000-square-foot facility in northeast Denver. The M1 features patent-pending aluminum extrusions and composites typically used in boat propellers. 

The market is responding in a big way, says Kepler. “We’re on forecast, so we’re totally stoked about that.” 

COST: Starting at $12,999 retail

Weird Birds

Denver, CO 

www.elizabethendicott.com

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After giving birth to her daughter, Elizabeth Endicott started sewing “whimsical children’s items” in 2017. Her Weird Birds took off on Instagram with dolls and stuffed animals, and Endicott soon branched out into jewelry and illustration. “Now I have a bright, sunny studio full of fabric and sewing machines and ideas,” she says. 

“I learned how to sew from my mother, who learned from her own mother, and every time I work, I feel tethered to a long line of textile artists,” Endicott says. “I try to make products that make me happy, and would’ve delighted my younger self, too.” 

The Kitty Set, a fabric envelope with a cat and its kitten, is a top seller, and Weird Birds’ diverse dolls remain popular. “Every year around the holidays, I also make a bunch of different ornaments, from owls to emotional mushrooms to Blucifers, and they’re so fun,” Endicott says. 

COST: Starting around $20 retail 

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]