About Us

We believe optimism & preparation gets us through the hottest challenges

Record Highs

Inspired by the National Parks

119°F / 48°C

Big Bend National Park

Texas

104°F / 40°C

Congaree National Park

South Carolina

105°F / 41°C

Zion National Park

Utah

122°F / 50°C

Joshua Tree National Park

California

Our story started in a hollowed-out Airstream outside Big Bend National Park, on a long trip to visit all 63 U.S. national parks. After a hot spring day on the Rio Grande and in the Chisos Mountains, one question wouldn’t let go: Why is a park this incredible so underrated? The answer was simple: heat. It then led to a bigger question: What does it look like to stay optimistic and adventurous in a warming world?

Out of that night in Terlingua, Texas came the idea for gear built specifically for rising temperatures. I brought it to one of my best friends, and we set out to design clothing for life above 90°F / 35°C – tested everywhere from Arizona’s dry desert to New York City humidity and the arid steppes of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Every Terlingua Threads product is named after a national park, and every color after the plants and rocks that live there. The parks shaped our commitment to authenticity, safety, and practicality. Our mission is simple: make hot-weather gear people actually want to wear, so they can explore these places safely, confidently, and comfortably as the world warms.

Doug
Co-Founder & CEO

Crafted with PASSION and precision

Terlingua Threads isn’t priced the way it is because of branding. It’s priced that way because of how it's built. Every piece is individually handcrafted and inspected in our production studio outside Porto, Portugal. Small batch, careful hands, no race-to-the-bottom production-line pressure.

We choose materials and components that do the job and hold up. Our bespoke Terlingua Coyote™ buttons are made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic, and our hemp-based fabrics are naturally tough, breathable, and break in beautifully over time.

Our slightly oversized, relaxed fit maintains an air gap that promotes convective airflow and evaporative cooling, so the garment works with the heat instead of trapping it.

We didn’t randomly guess at cooling. With input from internal medicine doctors and outdoors guides, we mapped where the body holds heat and built each silhouette around it. Button-ups (men’s & women’s) use underarm and back-yoke mesh to vent heat; men’s versions add side slits for airflow and mobility. Hooded henleys take another route: extra-long sleeves with reinforced thumbholes for coverage that doesn’t ride up. Across the line, we reinforce stress points for durability while still allowing for mobility.

These are all costly details most brands cut corners on. We don’t.

Made to Defy Planned Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is a profitable model. It keeps people coming back, even when they’d rather not. We’re trying to build a different kind of business: one that earns trust, not one that cuts corners and relies on failure.

Of course we hope you’ll buy from us again. But not because your shirt fell apart, faded weirdly, or lost its shape after a season. We want you to come back because you had a great experience, because the piece kept showing up for you, and because when it’s time to add something new that we developed, you trust who made it.

That’s what our pricing reflects: higher-quality materials that cost more, careful construction (especially in the details that are hardest to sew) and small-batch, handcrafted production by people who aren’t pressured to rush a garment down the line. The point is fewer replacements and more years of wear.

An Ethos of Humility & Optimism

Terlingua Threads crafts adventure gear that embodies steadiness and calm: built to help you stay cool-headed, unfettered, and unfazed when conditions get hard.

We believe our best days are still ahead, as people and as a society. We don’t control the weather or the headlines, but we do control how we show up and how we treat one another. That sense of agency – choosing our response instead of resigning ourselves to it – is baked into how we think about both adventure and work.

We’re also a very small, very new company (we aren't owned by a private equity). We don’t pretend to have everything figured out. Every week we learn more about how our gear actually gets used in the field. When we learn, we adjust. We care more about getting the product right than polishing the marketing, and we’d rather have fewer returns than more social media clicks.

Our shirts won’t change your life or change the world. They’re tools, not magic. We’ll tell you what they’re built to do and what they’re not. Our aim is simple: to be a quiet counterexample to the last decade of paying more and getting less.

Causes We Care About

We don't care much for checking boxes or greenwashing. These three bespoke causes connect directly to what matters to us: the places that inspire our gear, and the kind of creativity & passion we see in great problem-solvers and educators.

01

US National Park Preservation

1% of net product revenue supports U.S. national park conservation. The parks shaped our worldview and inspire every product name. Helping keep trails open, habitats intact, and access possible is our way of giving back to the places that started Terlingua Threads.

02

STEM Education in the Sonoran Desert

The teacher-engineer who designed our buttons and Coyote keychains chose to forgo lucrative tech careers to run K-6 STEM curriculum at an under-resourced school. This UCLA-trained Computer Science and Electrical Engineer inspires kids through creative experiments and 3D printing, showing them what’s possible. We honor his passion & care by giving 1% of our net sales to fund STEM education for his charter school in El Centro, CA.

03

Adult Developmental Disabilities Support

Portugal isn’t just where our products are made – it’s our manufacturing home. Every shirt and pair of pants we create passes through skilled hands just north of Porto. That’s why we commit 1% of our net sales to organizations in Portugal that support people with severe autism and mental disabilities – a cause deeply important to our manufacturing partner. By supporting these programs, we affirm that Portugal is more than a stop on a supply chain. It’s part of our story, our identity, and our responsibility.

Less Water, Less Plastic, More Wear

Sustainable practices in action

We’re not claiming our fabrics will save the planet, but we do think your everyday gear should make practical sense for long, hot seasons and finite resources.

Less water: Hemp and TENCEL™-type lyocell can grow with a fraction of the freshwater conventional cotton needs, so each shirt asks less of already-stressed water sources.
Less plastic: Our main fabrics are plant-based, not petroleum-based, so they don’t shed microplastic fibers every time you wash them. Where we do use mesh, it’s made from 100% cotton.
Smarter land use: Hemp produces more fiber per acre than cotton and helps improve soil structure as it grows; lyocell’s eucalyptus source can be grown on non-arable land that doesn’t compete with food crops.
Built to last, then let go: We design our pieces to be worn hard for years, not a single season, and to break down more naturally at the end of their life instead of lingering in a landfill.

The result is gear that performs in real heat while treading a little lighter on the places that make those adventures worth having.

Sustainable practices in action

Reach Out to Us... No, But Really

We want your honest feedback — it’s the only way we get better. So email us to tell us how you’re using your gear, what surprised you (good or bad), and what you wish were different next time. If you’d rather talk than type, you can use the link in the footer to book a quick Calendly call with one of the founders. Candid suggestions, hot-weather horror stories, or national park tales are all fair game.

Your experiences in real heat are what steer the changes we make with each new batch.

Send Us A Note

No AI Used: Every logo, type treatment, and photo on this site was created deliberately by us with real pens, cameras, and Adobe Creative Suite tools – not AI image generators. The words here come from us trying to think clearly about how to communicate our story & gear.