Born to Pee Wild: How Three Entrepreneurs Redesigned Women’s Outdoor Rec Pants

Charlotte Massey and Georgia Grace Edwards spotted somewhere in the wild. All images courtesy of SheFly.

Peeing outside might not seem like an important issue (at least for men, who don’t have to think twice about it), but when you’re rock climbing or mountaineering and need to be roped in, removing a harness to pee can be dangerous. And it points back to a larger issue—outdoor adventure pants are largely designed for men’s bodies, and adapted for women’s bodies with no considerations for the female anatomy.

The issue was personal for outdoor enthusiasts and Middlebury grads Georgia Grace Edwards, Bianca Gonzalez, and Charlotte Massey. It led them to start SheFly, a new outdoor apparel company whose signature product is a three-season line of pants with a discreet, patented zipper design that allows women to relieve themselves outside without exposing skin to the elements or other people.

Since 2018, their prototypes have gone through more than 50 iterations and now, with a waiting list of 6,000 customers, they will ship their new lines of pants by summer 2022, expand to brick and mortar and whole sales through a partnership with Moosejaw Mountaineering, and license their patented zipper design to other brands.

Over the years, Edwards, Gonzalez, and Massey have built SheFly while working in Vermont, India, Nepal, Argentina, the Czech Republic, New Mexico, Boston, and Washington State. Now they are establishing a headquarters in Gunnison, Colorado. Here Edwards and Massey share why they redesigned the zipper in outdoor rec hiking pants, how they brought their idea to life and what they’ve learned about building a business, while building their business.

Georgia Grace photographed during her time as a Mendenhall Glacier guide in Alaska.

Charlotte takes in the jagged peak views above tree line in Montana.

Tell us how your personal experience led to this idea.

Georgia Grace: I once worked as a glacier guide in Alaska on the Mendenhall Glacier and was spending 10 to 12 hours a day up on the ice, usually as the only or one of the only female guides.

In comparison to the male guides, who could easily unzip and go to the bathroom anywhere, I had to trek across the glacier and remove three to four layers, while avoiding crevasses in freezing temperatures, to do my thing. Then, I’d have to put all the layers back on and hike back to basecamp. I was freezing for hours after, to the point where I started dehydrating myself, which, unfortunately, is not an uncommon story among women in the outdoors. 

Charlotte: When I heard about the idea, it immediately resonated. I grew up mountaineering and rock climbing. I climbed Mount Rainier when I was 14 with my dad, and it was always just me and a bunch of men who were much older than me. 

When you're up on a snow field or a glacier, it can be dangerous to remove your gear, especially if you're roped up and rock climbing and you have to remove safety harnesses in order to go to the bathroom. 

How did this lead to SheFly? 

Georgia Grace: At Middlebury, we have a J-term in January and I decided to take a four-week class where you go from idea to complete business model and pitch. To prepare, I got a bunch of pairs of pants from friends, everything from sweat pants to cross country ski pants to ski bibs to jeans. And I prototyped them with my childhood best friend in her attic—she is much better at sewing than I am. 

We tried a variety of different mechanisms: velcro, snaps, and all different types of zippers. It was kind of a big Joanne's fabric run. Our prototypes looked absolutely horrendous, but, by the end of those couple hours of experimenting, I had a couple pairs of pants that I could test out of while wearing them. That was enough to take to the class and at least get the idea across. 

As you’d come to learn, this idea was on the minds of thousands of other women as well. 

Georgia Grace: It's not a new idea because it's such a big problem for so many people. But no one has executed it at the level that we're going for. We've established a lot of IP around our design in particular. 

Charlotte: Very few people would want to wear a pair of pants with one continuous, obvious zipper around the crotch. To be clear, we did wear prototypes that looked like that for the first year.

So we wanted our design to be comfortable and discreet. There are fabric flaps on the outside of the zipper so that the second zipper fly that allows you to pee just looks like it's a seam that starts below a traditional zipper fly that is used to take pants on and off. There is also a flap on the inside that makes it comfortable, so you can't feel that the zipper is there. 

We started the patent process while we were undergrads in college, and we now have design patents granted in 30 countries and we're pending with utility patents in another 30 countries. But it is expensive and difficult to protect your ideas. If it hadn't felt critical to protect our design, we would not have spent over half of our early revenue, plus so much time, on the IP protection.

What was your trial and error process like early on?

Georgia Grace: At the beginning, we operated as more of a service than a product business because all of our friends on campus, and even our professors, would come up to us and ask if we could sew zippers into the crotch of their pants. We were like, Are you sure, because they are not going to look good afterward? They said they wanted the functionality. It was an organic way to test the design in a variety of different fabrics, pants, and uses, from skiing to hiking to ice climbing. At last count, we’ve gone through well over 50 different iterations of our designs. 

Charlotte: The hardest part of the design was the fabric flap on the inside. Getting that curved right was difficult. We kept having bunching because when you look into a pair of pants, it looks like it's a straight line where the zipper falls. But when you lay it out and have to cut the pieces, it's on a curve and that angle is difficult to master. That’s part of what's covered in our patent.

How has business been so far?

Georgia Grace: We started with a crowdfunding campaign in spring of 2019 and funded 367% of it in just over a month so we ended up pre-selling 500 pairs of pants. We were two-thirds of the way delivering those when the fair-trade, zero-waste factory we used was put out of business overnight.

Charlotte: We lost everything in production that hadn't already been sent from fabric to hardware. Everything. We've been rebuilding our supply chain since then, and, in that time we've amassed a waitlist of almost 6,000 people. It grows every single day.

The founders, chilling in the outdoors.

Tell us something about each other that you’ve learned from working closely together. 

Charlotte: Georgia Grace is the detail oriented one, the person who makes sure that nothing slips through the cracks and that every step that we're taking makes sense for what we need to be getting done that month. She is also extremely good at public speaking and that helped us a lot, especially in the early stages when all we had was this idea and we had to convince potential customers and investors we knew what we were doing, even if we’re figuring it out as we go. 

Georgia Grace: Charlotte was a philosophy major in college and she's also an international debate champion, so you don’t want to disagree with her because she’ll talk you out of whatever you wanted to say. It’s a quality I very much appreciate when I get to be on her side of it. She keeps us on track with tight timelines and will respond to an email faster than anyone I know.

What have you learned about building a business, while building your business? 

Georgia Grace: In all of those advice, self-help books, especially as it relates to founding a company, people always give advice about never starting a company with your friends because everything could go wrong or only starting a company with your best friends because you can trust them and you already like working together.

I think all of that advice is completely irrelevant. Start a company with whoever is there at the right time, in the right place, who is as, if not more, excited about your company as you are. When you only have an idea, all you have to run on is the excitement and pure passion for bringing it to life. 

Charlotte: Two months into starting SheFly, people would tell us to drop out of college and, if we didn’t act now, we’d miss our opportunity. Then after graduating, we took full-time jobs. Part of that was because we needed to be able to bring in money to be building our IP portfolio and because we didn't have inventory yet, so we didn't have revenue.

We were also young and wanted to build our skills and network, so we could bring those to the company. That’s what we would not have been able to do if we had immediately jumped in full-time.

There’s this narrative that you're supposed to drop out of school and live in your parents basement and build something up into a unicorn immediately. And that's not necessarily how it has to go. It can work but I want people to know that it's okay to have something be a side hustle for a long time. Then you can pick the right moment when you have the momentum and when you know that you putting your time in now is going to make the difference to quit and go all in. 

If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.