An oral history of Flylow’s humble beginnings, as told from the perspective of Flylow cofounders Dan Abrams and Greg Steen, plus a few key players who were around during the early era.
1999
Dan Abrams, Flylow cofounder: We were in college in Washington and skiing at Crystal Mountain, and there was this French girl. We skied down and she said to me, ‘You don’t ski fast. You fly low.’ I thought, That would look good on a T-shirt.
Ethan Valenstein, college friend: I thought she was Austrian? And she was definitely talking to me. Either way, the phrase stuck in Dan’s head. He remembered it for years afterward.
Seth Dee, college friend: All I remember is the story that some French girl said that Dan doesn’t ski fast, he flies low. But that story but might be 100 percent bullshit.
Greg Steen, Flylow cofounder: There are only two things I’m positive about: I was there, and it was at Crystal Mountain.
Ethan: Backcountry skiing has been around for a long time, but back then, we dealt with being more uncomfortable. The outerwear was heavy, it got wet, it didn’t fit right. The pants were tight, the high-performance coats were tailored to fit harnesses. Dan was always talking like, maybe we should make something better?
Greg: I used to complain about how fast we blew through gear. Especially in the knees and the cuffs. We thought, why can’t anyone make a burly ski pant?
Seth: Dan was always thinking about businesses and different ideas. Greg was a little cooler. He was the best tele skier on the mountain. Plus, there was the fact that we were all singularly focused on skiing. We all moved to Jackson Hole after college. Outerwear felt like the obvious place to try to do something. There wasn’t a lot of cool new stuff in that space.
2004
Greg: Dan had left Jackson to go to grad school in Denver and he came out of grad school all fired up to start a company. Dan and I would talk regularly about ideas. I’d always been pushing this retro, late ’70s, early ’80s idealized era of skiing. It felt like that vibe. Dan and a graphic designer named Jared made the first T-shirt. It had skis across the front and faded orange to yellow.
Dan: A friend showed me how to make T-shirts using a wholesale license and where to find a screen printer. It was just a start, but I learned how to source products, make it my own, and sell it. The last class I took in grad school was taught by a former businessperson who explained, in an academic way, the concept of fake it to make it. That you are what people perceive you to be.
Roz Abrams, Dan’s mother: Dan’s pretty focused. Sometimes you don’t know where he’s going with it. He talks big. In grad school, he had this idea for a ski outerwear business. It felt like an opportunity that sort of materialized.
Eben Mond, early gear tester and athlete: When I first met Dan, we had this stare off behind the bar he was working at. I was like, who is this guy talking about skiing? Nobody knows skiing like I do. I was like, OK, let’s go skiing then. I told him I was sleeping in my camper in the Loveland ski area parking lot and the next morning at 6 a.m., someone is pounding on my window. I thought I was getting kicked out of the lot, but it was Dan. I was like, this guy is serious. I was going to these telemark ski demos for other brands, so I told Dan, give me some of your stuff and I’ll scatter your stickers and T-shirts all over the West.
Roz: Dan was living in my house in Denver at the time, and he took over the storage room in the basement. He built shelves and stacked them with these T-shirts he was selling—or was he giving them away? It wasn’t clear.
Seth: The first Flylow logo looked kind of like a butterfly. It was designed by this graphic designer who could drink a beer through a straw up his nose.
Greg: It was not a butterfly; it was supposed to be a bird. That was in the category of not the best of decisions.
Dan: Later, we ended up designing a new logo, one that was clean and cool-looking. We saw it and said, yes, that’s it.
2005
Dan: I found this factory in New Zealand called Cactus Climbing Equipment and they agreed to modify their climbing pants by adding a powder gaiter for skiers. They called them super trousers. That was our first pant, the Cactus Pant.
Ethan: We all said we wanted burliness, but those pants were maybe overkill.
Seth: Between the looser fit and that Cordura toughness, those pants couldn’t be shredded.
Eben: The first couple of years, they were just trying to figure out how to label themselves. It made sense to start in the telemark space because there was nobody in it. We thought it was strategic that we could go into this space and if it does well, we’d have enough of that market that we could move into a different one. It always felt like a stepping stone.
Dan: I bought the URL for Flylowtelemark.com and Flylowgear.com. I forgot to look up Flylow.com. Oops.
Greg: I pushed hard to make telemark specific gear, because I thought it would be impossible to break into the general ski market. It was for some distinction.
Seth: They never let themselves be restricted by calling themselves Flylow telemark gear at the beginning. Tele skiing was so popular then, it ended up being a shrewd way to define themselves. In my memory, they pivoted rather elegantly to being a broader company.
Greg: I inherently understood that the energy that you brought into a company was half of its success. Most people make purchases on an emotional level. I felt like capturing the energy of ski culture in a way that felt authentic and honored the past.
2006
Greg: The Dropkick Pant and Kung Fu Jacket were our first chance to design our ideal ski gear from the ground up. At that point, if we didn’t wear it, we didn’t make it. Those first pieces were comfortable and burly and we got to dial in the fit we wanted. The only problem is that all pants arrived from the factory with a waistband that was three inches too big.
Dan: We had the idea to ask the factory to put belts on all the pants to solve the issue. So, every pair of pants came with a belt that year.
Eben: There was this blueberry-colored softshell—it was bare bones. We all knew they had a long way to go as far as the quality of the fabric, but the functionality is where it shined.
Dan: We were trying to come up with names for that color. We thought it would be funny to have people say, ‘I would like a large blueberry-colored Kung Fu Jacket, please.’
Roz: I remember coming home one day and as I opened the garage, it was filled with pallets of boxes. Dan said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll all be gone soon.’ Those were the first pants and jackets. I don’t know how long that stuff sat in there.
Greg: The first production run was 500 pants and 1,000 jackets—it took us two years to sell it all.
Seth: It was this unique moment in modern historical times where it was easy for them to get credit, even if you had no business experience, and you could get manufacturing done abroad through the internet. That couldn’t have happened five years before or five years later.
Ethan: Dan was maxing out credit cards to start this business. I never knew the amounts, but from what it seemed, he was an expert at balance transfers and zero percent interest. I remember thinking, what happens when the music stops? Clearly, he had confidence that he could at least sell what he had.
Dan: I had a moment one day where I was like, am I really going to take $120,000 from my Visa credit card? I thought, if it all goes south and I can’t sell this stuff, it’ll only take me three to five years of bartending to pay that off. At the time, I thought that was a rational thing to do.
Seth: I thought Flylow was a cute little distraction and Greg and Dan would both have to get real jobs someday soon. I’m the dummy.
2007
Seth: Greg and Dan were both working full time in the service industry in Denver. They somehow had the energy to ski every day, go to their bartending and restaurant jobs at night, and then make this thing happen with Flylow, talking with stores, making contacts, figuring out how to find a factory in China.
Greg: We had one factory that actually wrote us back and said they could manufacture our gear. We sent them very rudimentary drawings and specifications of what we wanted. We had no idea how to make a tech pack. I’m sure most people starting a clothing company would hire a production manager and a couple of designers. Instead, we were like, we know what we like, I guess we’ll figure the rest out.
Ethan: Their approach to generating products with factories was as professional as they knew how. What wasn’t professional was their approach to R&D. It was skiing with friends, talking about gear, testing things on the mountain. I don’t know where the vision starts in other companies, maybe product developers or designers? But all those job titles were Greg and Dan on the chairlift or in the backcountry.
Roz: They took nothing and made it into something. It’s impressive. They had the determination, the follow through to make something.
2008
Dan: I started going from ski town to ski town, walking into shops, handing out stickers and shirts. Eventually, I heard about the Outdoor Retailer trade show. We only had one jacket and pair of pants to display, so we built a mannequin by hand, dressed him in the gear with a pair of tele boots, and called him Fast Freddy.
Eben: One year, we built a log cabin inside the ski-industry trade show. It took 60 hours to build. It was such a juvenile approach to such a professional thing. As far as marketing, we were always trying to be a little different.
Roz: I would show up to trade shows with trays of my homemade brownies. That was always my job.
Ethan: At those trade shows, a lot of people were there doing their jobs. Then in the Flylow tent, Greg and Dan were mixing cocktails, giving out high fives. They were so passionate. That gregarious approach to doing business was charming and made people smile. People would come by the Flylow booth just to get stoked.
Greg: Us at trade shows at that time, in a word: loose. We would buy a couch on Craig’s List to put in the booth. We just wanted to create a buzz, get people to hang out.
Ethan: There was this sense of them acting confident in their steps even though they had no idea what they were doing. I don’t know if their approach was received as refreshing in the industry or more like, you are crazy to do this.
2009
Ethan: Those first few years, if you saw someone in the liftline wearing Flylow, chances are they knew Dan or Greg or had one degree of separation.
Roz: I would be on the chairlift in Colorado, and I’d see someone in a Flylow coat. I’d immediately tell them that Dan was my son.
Dan: It did and still does make me super humbled that someone would choose our gear amongst all the options out there and trust us with their comfort and safety out in the mountains.
Greg: I never liked selling the gear. I would just tell the story. I’d say, we’re skiers, we ski 100 days a year, and we’re trying to make something better. I felt genuine satisfaction every time I packaged up an order. There was heart in it.
Seth: Dan is speed and efficiency and decisiveness. He’s a natural salesperson, ready to talk about ski clothing all day long in a way that’s compelling. Greg is thoughtfulness and contemplation, with an aesthetic eye that’s always looking for what’s next. They filled in the gaps for each other. That combination was one of the keys to their success.
2010
Greg: Dan and I went to China together to visit our factory and we were like, we got our passports, our tickets, let’s go to China. Nobody said anything about us needing a visa. We got stuck for a day and a half waiting for a visa. Then we had a day to kill in Shanghai, and we were like, let’s find the best duck in the city. We ate three different ducks, but the first one was so hot, I don’t think we tasted anything for the rest of the day.
Dan: I called it the duck hunt.
Greg: We had started selling gloves and I’d be baking gloves to order. Taking them out of a hot oven, sticking them into a polybag, and racing to FedEx as fast as I could, making it to work at the restaurant five minutes late every day.
Roz: The day that Dan stopped bartending and said he was going to work at Flylow full time was the day I saw him totally relax. He threw his black bartending shirt into the trash and said, I’m never wearing this again.
Dan: That was August 27, 2010. I got a pie in the face the day I left the bar. And I cried. I’d worked there for years. Those people were as much a part of the Flylow community as anyone.
Greg: The first five years were a junkshow. But we were intentional about it. We both believed in doing it ourselves. We Forrest Gumped our way into the whole thing. Somehow, it worked out.
This story appears in our new coffee table book, "Homegrown: Celebrating Flylow's Independent culture and grassroots vibe since 2005," which is on sale now.