Spencer Kadas quit his data science job at 31 to be a ski bum for a year. No grand plan, just one question: will I regret not doing this? A year later he bought High Above, the Seattle company behind some of the most bombproof, USA-made mountain bike packs out there. He'd never sewn a stitch. A month after the papers were signed, a ski wreck on top of Mt. Baker nearly took it all away.

In this episode we get into what it actually takes to buy a beloved, founder-built brand and make it your own: learning bag construction from High Above's original founder, moving the shop from Bellingham to Seattle's Pioneer Square, designing packs in CAD with a CNC fabric cutter, and why doing your own repairs teaches you more about durability than any spec sheet.

We also go deep on the new Cascadia, the hydration hip pack High Above spent almost two years developing, with a custom UHMWPE/nylon fabric designed from scratch, roughly four times the abrasion resistance of a standard pack cloth, and a magnetic buckle from a small Olympia, Washington company. And we close on the thing that grounds it all: the pressure to be “super rad” online, and why the real reason we ride has nothing to do with it.

Spencer Kadas is the owner of High Above, a Seattle (Pioneer Square) bag company known for bombproof, USA-made mountain bike hip packs. Spencer bought the company in 2024 with his friend Kyle, learned to sew on the job, and has since led the design of the Venture 3D, the Supernatural vest pack, and the new Cascadia.

Follow Spencer:

High Above https://highabove.net
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/fromhighabove/

Outside Is Magic is a podcast about the intersection of creativity and the outdoors, hosted by Christopher San Agustin, founder of Broken and Coastal.

Website: https://www.brokenandcoastal.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brokenandcoastal/

Subscribe for new episodes. If this one hit, share it with a friend.

Broken & Coastal on Patreon

I started a Patreon. It's where I share the behind the scenes of everything I make — animation, design, the podcast, sewing bags, printing zines, vibe coding. Most weeks I post a video of me building something, unedited, start to finish. The first one's already up: 44 minutes of me making the intro animation for this episode, side quests and all.

The podcast stays free, always. This is the rest of it.

First 25 to join lock in their price and get the first zine.

👉 https://patreon.com/BrokenandCoastal

#OutsideIsMagic #HighAbove #MTB #MountainBiking #MadeInUSA #HipPack #PNW #BikeIndustry #Podcast

outside is Magic is hosted by Christopher San Agustin.
Produced by Broken and Coastal.
Follow us on Instagram @brokenandcoastal
Help spread the magic. Hit follow, drop a review, or share the episode with someone who gets it. You never know who it might inspire.

What does it take to build an outdoor brand the whole industry starts referencing? For Kyle Siegel, founder of Raide, it started with a problem, not a brand. In this episode we get into how an engineer with stops at SpaceX, Snap, and The North Face ended up building one of the most distinct product companies in the outdoor space, and why he did it product-first, with no logo or name until the month before launch.

We talk about the moment his thinking flipped from "I'd like to start something" to "I won't live with myself if I don't," the three products he saw white space for (a ski pack, a running belt, and ski touring bibs), and the discipline of building gear around a single purpose instead of chasing trends or personas. Kyle breaks down his design philosophy: why a product should be recognizable from across the room the way a car is, and why that distinct look has to fall out of the mission instead of being painted on top of it.

We also get into the non-linear career path and what SpaceX and The North Face each taught him, manufacturing in Vietnam and Indonesia, the thesis that the high-performance community is far bigger than the big brands think, the case for staying small on purpose, and where AI actually fits for a creative founder. Plus the line he now lives by: don't be too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe.

Kyle Siegel is the founder of Raide, an outdoor brand building purpose-built equipment and apparel for skiing and running. An engineer by training, he worked at SpaceX and Snap before moving into product management at The North Face, then left to build Raide product-first, manufacturing in Vietnam and Indonesia and growing a fiercely specific brand for the high-performance, human-powered movement community.

Follow Kyle:

Raide Research https://raideresearch.com

Outside Is Magic is a podcast about the intersection of creativity and the outdoors, hosted by Christopher San Agustin, founder of Broken and Coastal.

Website: https://www.brokenandcoastal.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brokenandcoastal/

Subscribe for new episodes. If this one hit, share it with a friend.

#outsideismagic #raide #outdoorgear #trailrunning #skitouring #productdesign #founderstory #brokenandcoastal #endurancesports #builtdifferent

outside is Magic is hosted by Christopher San Agustin.
Produced by Broken and Coastal.
Follow us on Instagram @brokenandcoastal
Help spread the magic. Hit follow, drop a review, or share the episode with someone who gets it. You never know who it might inspire.

This conversation got me fired up. Cait Oppermann is a photographer and creative director in Brooklyn who runs her own studio, FLOWERS, and she's spent her whole career quietly refusing the standard playbook.

Cait moved to New York a week after turning eighteen, off a friendship she'd made on early Vimeo, and talked her way into the early days of tech and media in the city. She studied photography at Pratt, came up through editorial and commercial work, and eventually left her agent to build her own thing. Along the way she figured out that her best work only happens when she's having fun, that a portfolio is only as strong as its weakest image, and that her brain works best with a stack of index cards instead of another app she'll never open again.

We talk about inventing your own way of working, the pricing tool she built for photographers (BaseRate) because no one else would, why she prints everything and is "allergic to learning from a screen," and how AI is letting creatives build the bespoke tools they used to need a whole team for. It's a conversation about owning your time, trusting your own process, and just making the thing exist.

Go check out Cait's work and FLOWERS, and if you're a photographer trying to figure out what to charge, go look at BaseRate.

Cait Oppermann is a photographer and creative director based in Brooklyn and the founder of FLOWERS, a creative studio and production company. She published her first monograph in 2025 after a six-year project and built BaseRate, a pricing toolkit for photographers. Her work spans editorial and global commercial campaigns.

Follow Cait:

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/caitoppermann/
FLOWERS https://flowersfullservice.art/
BaseRate https://baserate.xyz/

Outside Is Magic is a podcast about the intersection of creativity and the outdoors, hosted by Christopher San Agustin, founder of Broken and Coastal.

Website: https://www.brokenandcoastal.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brokenandcoastal/

Subscribe for new episodes. If this one hit, share it with a friend.

#OutsideIsMagic #Photography #CreativeDirector #FLOWERS #BaseRate #CreativeProcess #Print #ADHD #BrokenAndCoastal

outside is Magic is hosted by Christopher San Agustin.
Produced by Broken and Coastal.
Follow us on Instagram @brokenandcoastal
Help spread the magic. Hit follow, drop a review, or share the episode with someone who gets it. You never know who it might inspire.