Cold
Weather
Collection
Mountain Uniforms has been
keeping outdoor workers warm
for almost 25 years
By Lisa Gordon
WARM WEARABLES
It will be a sweltering Saturday in ski
season before Kim Stearns takes a
one-size-fits-all approach to manu-facturing
cold weather gear.
As she well knows, mainstream out-erwear
designed for skiers and snow-boarders
doesn’t cut it for snow patrol
team members, ski instructors and
lift attendants who sometimes en-dure
as many as 180 days of biting cold
each winter.
“These guys don’t have a chance to
come in and get a coffee like a skier
would,” said Stearns, who founded
Mountain Uniforms in 1996. The cus-tom
cold weather apparel business,
located in Lake Tahoe’s Incline Village,
manufactures tailored gear that is built
for the job and the climate at hand.
“We are becoming the cold weather
gear experts,” Stearns said. “Our whole
business revolves around making work-ers
more comfortable on the job. We sell
to police, search and rescue, fire depart-ments,
and fish and game. That grew
out of our original sales to mountain op-erations
and ski patrollers. A lot of those
guys are volunteers and they really liked
our gear.”
In fact, many of Mountain Uniforms’
loyal customers have been coming
back for more than 20 years. People
who started out as lift attendants or
snowmakers have climbed the ranks to
managerial roles and now order gear
for their staff. Currently, the company’s
products are worn all over the world, in-cluding
Switzerland, Canada, Kazakh-stan,
and across the U.S. The company
does little advertising and its sales have
grown organically by word of mouth.
Some of its most popular products
include customized jackets with built-in
features such as microphone tabs, pen
pockets, Velcro nametags, ID-card slots
and waterproof zippers. Cargo pants
with zip-off suspenders and bibbed
utility pants feature handy pockets
and side zippers with double-stitched
and sealed seams. Black ops jackets,
radio vests and rescue jackets with zip-off
sleeves are also popular. Advance
orders of 20 or more pieces can be
color-customized with embroidery and
seam sealed during manufacturing, in
addition to other options.
“We have different fabric types, heavy
and light, different waterproof and
PHOTO COURTESY OF MOUNTAIN UNIFORMS
Three-layer Boundary Peak Jacket, custom-manufactured for Magic Mountain
Rescue Vest, tangerine with reflective accents
snowopsmag.com | SnowOps 21
/snowopsmag.com
