The 14Air Brand Story
Hi, my name is Troy and I am the founder of the 14Air brand. I wanted to take a minute to provide a brief background on the inspiration behind the 14Air brand and some insight into what I hope 14Air will become.
The very first concept of 14Air came to me about six years ago after hiking Mt Yale. Talking with some friends afterwards we kicked around the idea of how great it would be to have something a little cooler than just the basic 14er T-Shirts currently available online.
While this project seemed awesome and "easy to create" over a few adult beverages, it would be tabled until a year-and-a-half ago when I was planning my 9 year old nephew Lucas's first 14er trip and the idea came up again. I've been taking my nephew skiing over the last couple of years and we love the rankings system on ski mountains - The ratings system that allows skiers to move up from a green ski run to blue runs etc. He asked me if there were any shirts or clothing that he could get after we did his first 14er that represented that mountain or peak and the difficulty. After looking around on the internet again I couldn't find anything that really hit the mark for what I was looking for and I thought back to the original idea.
Thus I decided to move forward with creating the 14Air brand. You'll notice that it is broken down into four different groups based on the difficulty level the Green Mountains are all the green group contains all the easier 14 or such as mail. Scott and mount quandary the blue group is a moderately more difficult 14 or such as not yell in the Collegiate Peaks then you have your black mountains which are guitar fairly difficult such as crestone and Longs Peak and then finally you'll see the most extreme mountains are on the red shirts and those are 14 years such as pyramid Peak and North maroon Peak you'll notice that we do have one additional 14 or custom design and that's for Mount Shasta that came about because one of my co-workers climbed Mount Shasta this last June to support that cancer climb so we definitely want to get a custom design for that mountain. So the original goal of the 14 air brand was to create fun, unique shirts that you could you could have after you climb to 14er and you just have a really cool way to remember that you did a $14 and that's why I put the year on there as well but after creating it I started to think a little bit more about what I also want the brand represent and as I mentioned before there are a lot of great informative websites and literature out there about climbing fourteeners and camping on 14 years and all the cool stuff that you can do that include four teams well that being said what I want 14 air brand to be is a Lifestyle brand I want to eventually have user-generated content dominate the site and I wanted to be a brand about stories the reason I decided that I want the brand to be about people and stories is because when I fight is because of the people I met this summer when I had it when I had the 6:14 or is that I did
Lastly, 14Air is not an informational website for 14ers. We are very fortunate in Colorado because there are already some great websites out there that have amazing information about everything 14er - My favorite being 14ers.com So if you are looking for information on a route to hike or specific details around the difficulty or challenges that a particular fourteener may present please visit one of those sites. You you will not find that type of information on 14Air. 14ers.com also has an extremely valuable app that I highly recommend you download before you embark on any 14er adventure which I've used it myself and my friends have used it we love it