We were lucky to catch up with Brittany Coleman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Brittany, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

Over the course of my career, which included leadership and analyst positions for several outdoor and active lifestyle brands, I became increasingly frustrated as I noticed male-run product development and research teams not understanding women or including us in the decision-making process. An approach called “shrink it and pink it” –essentially taking a men’s product, making it smaller and making it pink, then selling it to women, often at a higher price point–is all too common in the industry. I founded ToughCutie in 2019, becoming the first and only outdoor sock brand with a majority women-owned value chain, and joining an estimated 1% of founders in the outdoor industry who identify as a person of color. Entirely USA-made in a WRAP-certified factory and designed using feedback from women, we unveiled our first sock – Eve: The Original Ladies Lightweight Merino Wool Hiker – in 2022. We take a slow and intentional approach to developing our products. We design FOR women BY women, incorporating customer feedback every step of the way. We listen to our customers, we invent on their behalf, and deliver an assortment of products that add value.

This is important because, although women have significant purchasing power —we make up more than half of the workforce and 80% of consumer purchases—we don’t always take control of finances and may be tempted to leave investment and financial planning to others. Sometimes, even talking openly about money can feel awkward and taboo.Women in the U.S. on average are paid 20% less than men, with the pay gap being even wider for Black women (38% less) and Latinas (47% less). All of this creates a gender-based economic imbalance where, in fact, women have less influence and are more vulnerable. We take a different approach. We intentionally partner with suppliers where the economic value we generate puts more money in the hands of women. There are a number of partners we could choose to work with, both here in the U.S. and overseas. But it’s not about making products at the lowest cost and sacrificing our ethics in the process (of course, all ToughCutie products are high-quality). It’s about walking the walk with our values, standing up for what we believe in, and doing what is right. Plain and simple.

Brittany, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Brittany Coleman and I am the founder of Tough Cutie, a new women’s outdoor & lifestyle brand on a mission to support women from the ground up and increase diversity in the outdoors. Before I became the puffy vest-wearing, gear-slinging, occasional glamper I am today (before I used words like “gnar”, “pow”, and “shred”), I was deep in the corporate world, breaking glass ceilings on an entirely different frontier.

A recent corporate meeting inspired me to shift gears. The topic: how to market and sell a new women’s brand. The result of that exercise was horribly hollow. We weren’t designing for my friend Christine, who has backpacked over 1000 miles solo, or my friend Stephanie, who quite literally “shreds” the “gnar” on the regular. Or even me who simply enjoys getting outside and being in nature with friends. No. The most inspired idea these men could come up with was? Drumroll please… the girlfriend of the REAL outdoorsman who just needed to look the part. She didn’t even get a real name.

Most people I meet in the outdoor industry identify acutely with Christine or Stephanie and have a visceral connection to the outdoors. My journey to the outdoor industry started in a very indoor place, at the company where that infamous meeting took place.

I grew up in Las Vegas, the youngest of four kids to a single mom. We were sporadically homeless and at times we did not have enough to eat. In short, we struggled. I’m not sharing all this with you so you feel sorry for me; I’m simply painting the picture that going into the outdoors was not my reality growing up and it certainly wasn’t anywhere on my mom’s priority list to cart four young crazy kids on a hiking trip. In fact, it was only a few years ago that I discovered people travel to Vegas for more than just sin. That, actually, a robust outdoor community exists there. Who knew?

The point is, I know wrong when I see it. The men in that meeting, unfortunately, presented such a narrow and inaccurate approach to addressing our unique needs as women. So I literally made it my business to do something about it. I started Tough Cutie to support working women from the ground up in all the ways we work—as athletes, entrepreneurs, caregivers, and everything in between.

Together, we’re building a movement to empower women of all backgrounds and provide agency to individuals who have felt powerless. We’re here to inspire you to do the same.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Before I started my own business, I had a career in the corporate world as a business analyst. In that role, I specialized in making processes more efficient; oftentimes, this meant working within long-established companies with a lot of technical debt and broken processes. Many of the approaches I used to make those businesses better unfortunately did not translate to the start-up world, which values nimbleness. So I had to learn to not focus on getting the perfect process in place, but rather on getting a good enough process in place to hit the milestone.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I first got started, it was important to me that my product be made in the USA and at a women-owned factory. As a result of that sourcing decision, it meant that I would have to buy a high quantity to start and pay a premium cost compared to certain options overseas. I didn’t have the money but supporting women owners was so core to how I wanted to do business that I knew I needed to find a way to fund the business and stay true to my values.

I had heard a lot about crowdfunding and decided it was a good route for me given the high costs I was facing with manufacturing a product domestically. Unfortunately, that campaign did not go as planned and we did not reach our funding goal. It was a very public and embarrassing failure, especially for a type-A person like me. It was hard not to take the failure as a personal rejection of me and my brand value and values. Fortunately, around the same time, I entered a pitch competition for women-owned businesses. Somehow, despite the fact that I was stressed that my hair was falling out and my nerves were completely shot, I managed to pull off an amazing pitch and won! In fact, I won a retail distribution contract with Title Nine, one of the most respected women-owned outdoor brands in the country! Within a matter of weeks, I went from completely losing to winning one of the best customers I could hope for. So it just goes to show you how quickly things can change and not to give up.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.toughcutie.com
• Instagram: @ToughCutieBrand
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tough-cutie/

Image Credits
Whitney Whitehouse Bianca Buentello