Product Testing with Mountain Khakis

I’m off to Mount Shasta with Reed for a few days of California sun and will be blogging when I can.

Last week I saw the Mountain Khakis Land Rover parked on the road on my way to work. Now this is not surprising, since the Jackson Hole based company recently relocated to some office space near where I work. What was surprising was what was hanging off the front bumper…a pair of pants! I had to find out more.

I quickly saw some familiar faces who introduced me to drivers of the rig, Jordan Hauser and Zach Knight. Some quick small talk lead to my questions about the pants, and they were happy to tell the story.

Turns out, Jordan and Zach are part of what Mountain Khakis calls, “The Build Tour”. As a way to promote the company’s durable trousers, Zach and Jordan travel across the country, getting in touch with the people at shops, events and literally everywhere. The focus is at a grassroots level and they stress that it emulates the Mountain Khaki philosophy…”pure freedom and rugged adventure”.

These guys seemed to have a pretty cool job if you ask me, traveling the country in a sweet ride, on someone else’s dim They must be smooth talkers…now back to the pants. As suspected, the pants were strapped onto the front of their tricked out Range Rover in an experiment in product testing. This was the second pair affixed to the push-bar of the SUV, with the first pair traveling over 20,000 miles before being stolen at Canoecopia 2006, a paddlesports event in Wisconsin.

Zach and Jordan report that before the theft, the pants were holding up extremely well…showing few signs of wear. This second pair has it’s own story to tell, surviving the big Colorado storms earlier this season…as well as nearly three trips across the country already. They hope this second pair will stick around for even longer than the first, and plan to show them off at some of the trade shows throughout the year.

You can follow along with Jordan and Zach’s adventures on their blog, and of course you can do your own product testing by getting a pair of Mountain Khakis.