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.

Steve Crandall is the founder of FBM, the BMX brand he started as an inside joke and an art project that turned into a bike company. Today he runs RadShare, a grassroots nonprofit out of Richmond, Virginia that gets kids on bikes and keeps their heads safe.

This one is personal for me. Crandall is one of the people who taught me that BMX was never just about the bike. It was about building your own thing, making zines, making art, and pulling people together when no one was going to invite you in.

We get into starting FBM as an outsider looking in, why the best stuff he ever made happened with a group of friends and not alone, the ripple effect of getting one kid stoked, and why something you can hold in your hands still beats anything that gets a second of your attention online. We also talk about bike events as art projects, what RadShare is really trying to do, and what it looks like to keep making your own fun thirty years in.

Go give Crandall some love and check out RadShare. They sell coffee to fund the whole thing, so go grab a bag.

— Crandall & RadShare —
RadShare: https://radshare.org/
FBM: https://www.fbmbmx.com/
Steve on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crandallfbm/

— Outside Is Magic —
Hosted by Christopher San Agustin, founder of Broken and Coastal.
Website: https://www.brokenandcoastal.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brokenandcoastal/

If you're enjoying these conversations, the best way to support the show is to subscribe, leave a comment, and share it with a friend.

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.

Meesh and I have known each other a long time. Mutual friends, overlapping rides, the kind of friendship that started by crossing paths in the same places and got real once we both landed in Portland. We come at this work from the same spot too. Two people who spend most of the day alone behind a screen, then go looking for the exact opposite. A trail, a group ride, something printed you can actually hold.

There's a tension we both keep circling. We love the outdoors, and we're also being pulled deeper into the digital tools that make our work possible. Knowing where to stand in the middle of that is harder than it sounds.

We get into building community through bikes, the burnout that comes with organizing and learning to share the load, teaching yourself to code as a bike courier, the pull toward tangible things in a digital world, and why she's been chasing the feeling of being bad at something new.

Michelle Wilcox is a web engineer who taught herself to code while working as a bike messenger in San Francisco. That path took her to Strava, and these days she builds the tools that help public transit agencies keep cities moving. Outside of work she's an organizer at heart, the person who builds the rides and races that pull a whole community together.

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

Subscribe for new episodes. If this one hit, share it with a friend who needs a push to go be bad at something.

#outsideIsMagic #CreativeLife #Cycling #CommunityBuilding #DesignPodcast

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.

Max Young and I came to this conversation from the exact same spot. Two senior creatives, a decade-plus in, standing at the same crossroads and asking ourselves the same questions. What kind of work do we actually want to be doing now? What should we be focusing on? And is the path we're on still the right one?

That crossroads can feel isolating. You build something up, get excited about it, and then there's this voice that quietly tries to pull it back down. Turns out Max deals with it too.

We get into self-doubt, the leap from designer to creative strategist, coming up through punk and DIY culture, the pull toward physical objects in a digital world, and the slow work of untangling your identity from your job title.

Max is a designer and art director who spent years in the sports world, most recently at the Seattle Mariners. He runs Love Machine, a gravel cycling project rooted in Vancouver.

Follow Max:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dmaxyoung/
Website: https://www.dmaxyoung.com/
Love Machine: https://www.lovemachinecycling.ca/
Love Machine Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lovemachinecycling/

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.

Laura Kinman spent 25+ years in the outdoor industry, and she didn't plan to start a brand. Then, in October 2024, she was laid off from Patagonia while flying home from Vietnam. She calls it the day she "won the lottery."

In this episode, Laura traces a winding path. Growing up hunting for sharks' teeth near Myrtle Beach. Meeting her husband on a 1990s bulletin board system talking about 90210. Living the "Rachel from Friends" life as a young buyer in New York. And finally landing a job at Patagonia she felt completely underqualified for, where she "went in a climber and became a surfer."

We talk about imposter syndrome, the quiet grief of a layoff, learning a sport as an adult, and the decision to build Coastal Range Collective: a women's swim and surf brand made for the "other 90 percent," the women still paddling out at 50, 60, 70, not just the elite 1 percent.

Honest, funny, and a little tender. A conversation about second acts and what you do with the time you're given.

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.

In this episode of outside Is Magic, I sit down with Braydon Bringhurst, a professional mountain biker, filmmaker, public speaker, father, and the founder of the Hard MTB League. You may know him from his film 8,600 Feet, but this conversation goes well beyond the bike.

This one is about process. About what it actually takes to overcome something hard, and what the bike can teach you when you treat it as more than a sport. We talk about turning pain into action, building self-belief through repetition, and why the way you treat people who can do nothing for you might be the only thing that really matters.

We get into:

- The mindset behind attempting the impossible on a bike
- Why overcoming isn't one massive effort, it's information
- How pole vaulting shaped a hyper-detailed approach to riding
- Building community over competition with the Hard MTB League
- Finding the right people instead of convincing the wrong ones
- Treating everyone the same, regardless of what they can do for you

📬 Join the Coastal Letter
brokenandcoastal.com

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.