Travis Campbell bought a soon-to-be-shuttered Eagle Creek from VF Corp and moved the travel gear brand to his hometown of Steamboat Springs in 2021, joining nearly two dozen other outdoor companies in the city renowned for outdoor innovators. The former head of Smartwool and VF Corp executive said Eagle Creek “is the kind of small business that America should be proud of.”
“But with these tariffs,” he told U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper at a U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship hearing in Denver last week, “it feels like our country is systematically working against small businesses like ours.”
Right now Campbell has $1.8 million in Eagle Creek gear — burly packs, luggage, duffels built in Indonesia — that is about to be shipped to the U.S.
When Campbell ordered that gear — which retailers have already signed up to put on their shelves — he was set to pay about $226,000 in tariffs. Under the most recent tariff plan proposed by the Trump administration, that duty would increase by $580,000.
“This is the kind of shock that is simply unsustainable for us,” Campbell said. “In our 50th year of operations, we could be put out of business by our country’s ill-planned trade policies.”
Campbell told the senator that the pause on tariffs gives him some breathing room but he’s preparing for losses and slashing spending and projections as the on-off tariffs destroy a nearly two-year planning process of designing, selling, ordering, manufacturing, shipping and distributing Eagle Creek gear.
“Today, I have no idea where the tariffs are and a small business owner to not know where those tariffs inputs are is terrifying,” said Campbell, who worries about the stress on his dozens of employees as they plan and replan the business. “It’s a constant struggle to know what’s going to happen.”
Hickenlooper’s committee hearing — held at History Colorado and titled “Beyond the Trailhead: Supporting Outdoor Recreation in an Uncertain Economy” — included Mike Mojica, the founder and CEO of Outdoor Element, which designs adventure survival equipment in Englewood, and outdoor apparel veteran Trent Bush, the founder and co-CEO the new Artilect Studio in Boulder.
Mojica, a mechanical engineer who fine-tuned his survival gear business in the Moosejaw Business Accelerator program in 2022, said his company posted a record year in 2024.
“What I thought was a path to the American dream has become quicksand,” he said of tariffs that have forced him to sell his gear for zero profit. “Trade policy is supposed to provide business with the certainty we need to make long-term decisions and right now that certainty is missing. I’m no longer trying to thrive. I’m trying to survive.”
Bush started his first business making snowboard apparel as a high school student at Boulder High in 1989. He tried to keep production in the U.S. but had to move overseas. He’s spent the last 30 years founding six brands and working for major outdoor companies before launching Artilect, a technical apparel company, from Boulder in 2019.
The high tariffs “may force my business to close,” he told Hickenlooper. Bush said the Trump trade war “has sparked an anti-American sentiment that is severely damaging American brands,” challenging sales in overseas markets.
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Campbell said he has gotten emails from customers and retailers in Canada who said “we love your products but we are never buying another one.”
He wishes the Trump administration would more closely study the possibility of domestic manufacturing before punishing companies that manufacture abroad.
“I could have told them it would be impossible to make our products here,” Bush said. “Do your research before you turn off our lifelines.”
Hickenlooper, who came into politics after opening Colorado’s first brewpub in a dark corner of downtown Denver decades before it became a hotbed of tony eateries and hotels, compared the recent tariffs proposals to those that leveled economies in South America in the 1960s and ’70s. And the trade war is stirring growing pessimism, he said.
“I think we are at the precipice of a recession and it could be a serious recession and the losses we will endure will be structural. In other words they will have a long tail,” Hickenlooper said. “It’s a challenging time.”