Forty six years ago this July, a man with a torn meniscus led his children up Mount Washington from the Ammonoosuc Ravine trailhead. Karl Glocker had planned to have the knee repaired later that summer. It gave out on the descent, somewhere above Lake of the Clouds. They got it back in and finished the hike anyway. One of the kids on that walk was nine years old and had already been camping in the White Mountains for a season. He would go on to play defensive end at Penn State, earn an MBA at Harvard, spend a decade at Goldman Sachs, and then, at an age when most people are protecting what they have, move to a town of 1,600 people in Franconia Notch and start sewing hoodies.
That is the story Burgeon Outdoor tells about itself, and the unusual thing is that the sewing part is literal. Walk into the Lincoln, New Hampshire storefront and the production floor is right there behind the racks. The people making the garment are the people selling it to you, in the town it was designed for, forty minutes from the summit in the founding story.
The short version: Burgeon Outdoor, founded 2019 in Lincoln, New Hampshire by Rudy Glocker, designs and sews technical mountain apparel in two White Mountains towns and gives 5 percent of sales to community and conservation work in the same watershed. The Highlander Hoodie is the anchor product and the one to start with. The claims are more specific and more checkable than almost anything else in this industry. The gaps are real too, and we name them below.
Why this one is our North Star
We write about a lot of outdoor brands here. Most of them are good companies telling a slightly generous version of the truth. Burgeon is the rare case where the story gets more convincing the closer you look, and that is why it sits at the front of this series rather than somewhere in the middle of the alphabet.
The reason is a sentence Glocker uses that could have been written for this site: mountain communities that are economically vibrant, environmentally sustainable, and socially rich. Not economy or ecology. Both, in the same paragraph, funded by the same product. That is the thesis the whole Ideal Location ecosystem is built on, and Burgeon has been running it as a live business, profitably, in one of the hardest categories in retail, since before we started writing any of this down.
Where Burgeon came from
The family is from Royersford, Pennsylvania, a Schuylkill River town of under 5,000 people. The Glockers came north for the mountains: skiing in winter, a lake over the Vermont line in summer, camp on the water, and eventually the Whites themselves. Crawford Notch, the Kinsmans, the Pemi Wilderness, Great Gulf. Rudy has said plainly that his father’s love of the outdoors is what put him in a position to build his own.
Then a long detour. Penn State, where he started at defensive end on the number three team in the country in 1991. Harvard Business School, class of 1998. Ten years at Goldman Sachs. Executive roles at consumer companies after that. It is the resume of someone who could have done almost anything, and what he chose was the version with the thinnest margins and the most exposure to weather.
He came back to the Whites as an adult and saw what a lot of people who love mountain towns eventually notice: seasonal jobs, thin winters, wages that do not carry a family, young people leaving. Burgeon was designed as a response to that specific problem. Apparel was the vehicle, not the point. The name means to flourish.
It did not go smoothly. Glocker’s own description of the first launch is one word: “Not well.” Delayed deliveries, quality problems, marketing mistakes. His summary of the period is more candid than most founders permit themselves in print, something to the effect that they did not know what they were doing, nor how little they knew. Four products shipped in November 2019. Four months later the pandemic closed the doors.
What happened next is the part worth remembering. They put the outdoor line down and made masks instead, roughly 10,000 of them, given away to healthcare workers, grocery staff, and vulnerable neighbors. Glocker has framed it as a binary: live the mission or ignore it. A four month old company with no cushion chose the expensive answer. Ammonoosuc Community Health Services wrote back to say there are organizations that talk about doing the right thing and organizations that do it.
The inheritance: what Burgeon picked up in Gorham
This is the chapter most write ups miss, and it is the best one.
In 1981, two alpinists named Marie Meunier and John Bouchard started building their own gear near Mount Washington because nothing on the market was good enough. They called it Wild Things. In the 1983 catalog they coined a phrase the entire lightweight movement still runs on: light is right. They pioneered the high altitude one piece suit and the haul bag. Charlie Fowler, Mark Richey, Mugs Stump, and Dean Potter all had a hand in the product. By the 2000s Special Forces had found them, and the company drifted from climbers toward military contracts, eventually sewing cold weather systems for every branch of the armed forces out of a factory in Gorham, New Hampshire.
In 2022, Wild Things moved out of that Gorham building. Glocker heard, went to the landlord, and took the lease. Burgeon opened its Gorham floor that September with three former Wild Things sewers on staff, and acquired select production and intellectual property assets in the process. Those hands had been making technical alpine and military garments in the North Country for years. The first product out of the new floor was the Tuckerman, Burgeon’s first hardshell.
So the line runs unbroken: two climbers in 1981 who could not buy what they wanted, forty years of White Mountains stitching, and a company in 2026 still sewing in the same room. Very little manufacturing lineage in this country survives a handoff like that. This one did, because somebody local was paying attention.
The fabric, and a New England ghost story
Burgeon buys serious material. The Highlander uses a proprietary grid microfleece knit by Cyberknit in Hickory, North Carolina, converted to recycled polyester as volume allowed. The Alpha Direct pieces and the Sunseeker sun hoodie use Polartec Alpha and Polartec Delta.
Polartec is worth pausing on, because it makes the point of this whole page. Polartec is what is left of Malden Mills, the Lawrence, Massachusetts company that invented synthetic fleece and licensed the first version to a small climbing outfit called Patagonia. In December 1995 a dust explosion destroyed most of the plant. Owner Aaron Feuerstein kept paying his workers’ full salaries through the rebuild, which made him briefly the most admired industrialist in America.
It also helped bankrupt him. The rebuilding debt was part of what pushed Malden Mills under, and the company was eventually sold out of bankruptcy and renamed. Today Polartec forms fabric in Hudson, New Hampshire and finishes it in Cleveland, Tennessee.
Hold those two facts next to each other. The most generous mill owner in modern New England history went broke being generous. And the fabric his mill still makes, sixty miles down the road, now gets sewn by a company whose entire premise is generosity toward a mountain community.
The difference, and this is the actual lesson, is that Burgeon put the profit first. Glocker told the Union Leader that the company financed its growth out of earnings: profitable the prior year, expecting to be profitable again, and that is what let them reinvest. Business NH Magazine reported roughly 35 percent annual revenue growth between 2022 and 2023 with the company hovering around profitability. The 5 percent, the healthcare, the bonus pool, the trail crews: all of it is funded by a business that works, not by a business that is being martyred for its values. Feuerstein’s instinct was right and his structure was fragile. Burgeon is the same instinct with the structure fixed.
What they actually make well
The Highlander Hoodie. The flagship, in pullover and full zip. The full zip lists at $109.95 and weighs 9.5 ounces in a medium. Grid face fabric, full length front zip for venting, and a double hood closure with both a drawstring and a snap. Excellent warmth to weight, packs to nothing, breathes hard enough to wear while moving and still holds heat at a stop. This is the piece to buy first.
The Flume baselayer. Built for hikers, adopted by everyone. Breathable, anti microbial, good across a wide temperature band, and repeatedly named a best hiking shirt by Field & Stream. It has quietly become the item people own three of.
Alpha Direct pieces. The 120gsm Alpha runs shockingly warm for the weight and dumps heat fast, which makes it a runner’s and fast hiker’s layer more than a standing around layer. Testers were running in it in early spring without overheating and staying warm on breaks.
Sunseeker sun hoodie. Polartec Delta, built for humid heat, cools with the smallest amount of moving air.
The Tuckerman hardshell. The Gorham inheritance made into a product, aimed at the worst the Presidentials produce. PFAS free waterproof development is on their stated roadmap alongside new insulated pieces.
The ledger: what the 5 percent actually funds
Most brands write a sustainability paragraph. Burgeon publishes something closer to a receipt, which is why we can check it.
Five percent of the purchase price of a Highlander Hoodie goes to community and conservation work. Separately, another 5 percent of Highlander sales feeds the employee bonus pool. Burgeon covers 100 percent of healthcare premiums for everyone averaging 30 or more hours a week, and gives paid time off and all ten federal holidays, in a rural tourism economy where those things are close to unheard of.
On the land side, they maintain three trails in partnership with the Appalachian Mountain Club: Old Bridle Path, Pine Link, and the Willey Range Trail, roughly ten adopted miles in total. The giving list also includes the Mount Washington Observatory, New England Disabled Sports, Pemi Search and Rescue, Lakes Region Search and Rescue, the Linwood Rotary, Linwood Ambulance, and community centers in Lincoln, Franconia, and Lisbon.
Several of those organizations have their own records in our nonprofit directory, which means you can look at the recipients rather than take the giving on faith: the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Mount Washington Observatory, Granite Backcountry Alliance, and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
Where this gear comes from, and where it earns its place
Home ground is Franconia Notch and the Presidential Range, and this is genuinely different country from the western landscapes most of our guides cover. The Whites are not tall by Rockies arithmetic, but Mount Washington holds one of the most violent weather records on the continent, treeline arrives around 4,400 feet, and a June ridge walk can turn into wind, fog, and hypothermia inside an hour. The layering problem Burgeon designs around is not theoretical. It is the specific problem of that summit cone.
All three adopted trails are in the Trail Atlas, along with 464 named New Hampshire routes. Search them by name:
- Old Bridle Path (44.1502, -71.6710), the standard approach out of Lafayette Place toward Greenleaf Hut and the Franconia Ridge
- Pine Link (44.3497, -71.2571), the quiet northern line off the Randolph side of Madison
- Willey Range Trail (44.1898, -71.4268), the steep spine above Crawford Notch
Build a first trip from there. Falling Waters Trail and the Franconia Ridge Trail close the classic loop off Old Bridle Path. Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail, the one in the founding story, is still the most direct honest route to Lake of the Clouds. Crawford Path is the oldest continuously used mountain footpath in America. Tuckerman Ravine Trail gives the product its name and, in spring, gives you the reason.
The honest take
We like this company more than almost any other in this series, which is exactly why the criticism has to be specific.
No third party verification. Burgeon is not a certified B Corp, not a 1 percent for the Planet member, and not carrying a climate certification. The 5 percent is self reported and self administered. It is five times the 1 percent benchmark and the recipient list is detailed enough to check, but it is checked by us and by you, not by an auditor. For a company whose entire competitive case is credibility, one outside verification would be worth more than another marketing page.
“Made in USA” is doing real work, and it still has seams. The sewing is genuinely in Lincoln and Gorham. The fabric is not: the Highlander knit comes from North Carolina, Polartec forms in New Hampshire and finishes in Tennessee. That is a domestic supply chain and it is far better than the industry norm, but it is a supply chain. Note also that some of their own promotional copy says “many items” are made in New Hampshire rather than all of them. Worth asking about a specific product before you assume.
It is still polyester. Green, Navy, and Black Highlanders moved to recycled polyester in 2024. The other colors did not. And recycled or virgin, synthetic fleece sheds microfibres in the wash, which remains the unsolved problem of this entire category, not a Burgeon failing. The real mitigation is durability and repair, and on that front they do well.
Small company constraints. A production team in the low double digits across two towns means occasional stockouts, limited color and size runs, and slower iteration than a brand with an overseas factory. If you need a specific size in a specific color on a deadline, buy early.
Fit runs small, and they tell you so. Burgeon’s own advice is to size up. The reviews mostly agree, and they also agree on what happens next: sized up, the Highlander gets roomy through the middle. Across 46 reviews of the men’s full zip the average sits at 4.65 out of 5, and the recurring complaints are consistent and fixable design notes rather than quality failures, chiefly the absence of elastic cuffs and hem. One reviewer added his own snaps and cord locks and was happy. That is a small brand tell, in both directions.
The price is a real ask. $109.95 for a fleece hoodie puts Burgeon against companies with vastly bigger budgets, and Glocker has said outright that he positions the products in the Arc’teryx and Patagonia band of performance and price. That is a large claim from a company most people have never heard of. Our read after examining the fabric sourcing, the construction, and the review pattern is that the claim mostly holds on the Highlander and the Flume, and that the rest of the line is still earning it.
The stated ambition is enormous. Step one, New England’s outdoor brand. Step two, the largest made in America outdoor apparel manufacturer. Step three, the preeminent aspirational outdoor brand, replicated across the Appalachians, Rockies, Cascades, Sierra, and eventually the Alps. Nothing about that is impossible. Everything about it is hard, and scaling the model is precisely where the mission usually breaks. It is the thing to watch over the next five years.
Our verdict
Buy the Highlander Hoodie, sized up, and expect a layer you will still be wearing in a decade. Buy the Flume if you hike more than a dozen days a year. Wait on the hardshell until you have handled one.
But the reason Burgeon leads this series is not the hoodie. It is that a former Wall Street executive went back to the mountains of his childhood, took over a departing alpine factory’s lease, hired the people who had worked in it, put the fabric of a bankrupt New England mill through their hands, and built something profitable enough to pay for trail crews and healthcare in a town that badly needed both. Economy and ecology, in collaboration, in one balance sheet.
That is the standard. We are measuring ourselves against it.
Disclosure: we have no affiliate relationship with Burgeon Outdoor and earn nothing if you buy from them. This profile was written from public sources, the company’s own published statements, and independent reporting in the Union Leader, Business NH Magazine, Forbes, and Garage Grown Gear. Trail data from the Ideal Location Trail Atlas. More makers in Brands We Love, and region by region kit in the Gear Guides. Last verified August 2026.