With her company, Wyatt Outdoors, Colleen Tuohy cowgirled her dream of stylish performance apparel for women into reality.
Colleen Tuohy pulls up to a coffee shop in Missoula with her bird dog, Patsy Cline, napping in a crate in the back of her vehicle. She kicks the dirt off her brown leather cowboy boots, tugs a green wool jacket around her, and adjusts the worn felt hat on her head. She’s come straight from bird hunting, she says, and a cup of coffee sounds great. Inside the shop, Tuohy settles in at a table and tells the story of how she went from working retail in New York City to launching her own brand of clothing, Wyatt Outdoors, in Montana.
“I’ve always been a cowgirl at heart,” Tuohy says. “I grew up watching westerns. I was the 9-year-old wearing blue suede fringe chaps to the grocery store. It was just in me.”
As a girl, Tuohy spent summers catching minnows and learning how to fish in South Jersey. After college, she moved to Colorado and opened a small pet boutique in Aspen that sold organic dog food and fancy toys. Then she shifted into human fashion — her first gig was working as a hat shaper at high-end boot and hat shop Kemo Sabe. Later she opened a new Ralph Lauren store in the Colorado ski town and rose through the ranks, eventually moving to New York City to work in management for the company.
What she learned at those jobs helped shape her career. “Steaming a hat, shaping it, and putting that warm hat on somebody’s head, then seeing the smile come across their face — that’s the feeling I have carried with me,” she says. “That’s what I want to create.”
Wyatt Outdoors founder Colleen Tuohy, layered in The Daily henley and The Carter shirt, spends fall in the prairies of Montana with her English Setter, Patsy Cline.
She was chasing that feeling and that entrepreneurial drive in 2020, when, while attending the Cowgirl Roundup at the Resort at Paws Up in Montana — a weekend packed with horseback riding, fly-fishing, and hanging out with spirited, outdoorsy women — she decided to strike out on her own. “The cowgirl camaraderie that experience created was inspiring and supportive, and it made you want to start your next great chapter,” Tuohy says. “I knew I needed to start this outdoor apparel company.”
And she did. Even before getting on the plane in Montana to head back to the East Coast and her job, she called and gave her notice at Ralph Lauren.
For the next three months, Tuohy worked for the retailer by day and planned her new company by night. To save money, she gave up her apartment in the city and moved into a canvas-walled tent on a hay farm in the Catskill Mountains. For the next seven months, she cooked over a fire and parked outside a coffee shop to access the internet. At night, she read by the light of a battery-powered lamp.
“That’s why I say Wyatt is for women who light their own fire,” she says. “I couldn’t even sleep because I was so thrilled about this idea coming to fruition. It just came from the inside out. I was so determined.”
Tuohy has always preferred spending her time outside over inside, dirt roads to paved. Mother Nature and her animals are what spark joy and inspiration, as do wearing her WYATT tees and wool Carter shirts and making them in America.
Tuohy drew the name for her new company from all the women who have inspired her over the years. “Wyatt, she’s my muse, a collection of all these women I’ve met along the way. She’s a fly-fisher, a cowgirl. She rides barrels; she flies her own Cub plane,” Tuohy says. “She’s a part of all of us.”
Her first Wyatt project was to design something she’d never been able to find: a well-made shirt she could wear while fly-fishing, bird hunting, and going out at night. “They never fit me great, and they weren’t a style I was going to wear to dinner,” she says. “It was frustrating to me that I couldn’t walk into a shop and spend money on a shirt that had the performance qualities I needed and the style that I wanted.”
The most important part of Wyatt for me is that I make women feel good about themselves. — Colleen Tuohy
Her solution was a shirt she calls the Cinch, named for a knot commonly used in fly-fishing — she’s wearing one now. Made of quick-dry fabric, it’s vented, washer-dryer safe, with double breast pockets, pearl snap buttons, and a yoke. It’s long enough to tuck in but hemmed so it can be worn untucked. Like all her apparel, it comes in sizes from extra-small to 2XL.The Wyatt Outdoors line also includes henleys, wool shirts, and a T-shirt, plus an American-wool jacket called The Darrell, named after Darrell Winfield, the American rancher best known as the Marlboro Man. “I say the Darrell jacket comes with a story and now it’s yours to pass those stories down along with the jacket,” she says.
Launching Wyatt Outdoors in record time — she debuted it at the following Cowgirl Roundup just a year after her original inspiration there — was, she says, the hardest thing she’s ever done by far. In that time, she had to track down fabric, find people to make the clothes by hand on the East Coast, test fabrics, and work on designs. She’s dealt with lost shipments and unexpected hiccups.
High-quality, American-made: Tuohy cruising downtown Livingston, Montana, in her 1973 International Harvester pickup and The Darrell jacket — an automotive heirloom and an apparel heirloom-in-the making.
“Her path has not been straight, nor was it meant to be,” says Gina Heinrich, who shaped hats alongside Tuohy at Kemo Sabe in Aspen. “Wyatt is a brand that tells the story of this woman — her love of fashion, the risks she has taken, and what it looks like to live out your dreams and take the road less traveled.”
For now, Wyatt Outdoors remains a one-woman road-less-traveled operation, based out of Livingston, Montana, where Tuohy moved to be able to do the things she loves, like hunt with Patsy Cline and fly-fish. “I am shipping, receiving, design, sourcing, marketing, customer service, travel,” she says. And the company remains small: The brand is available in just a dozen stores in the Rocky Mountains and Texas, and online. Tuohy hopes to open her own retail shops eventually, but she’s happy with the results thus far and planning for the future.
“My vision is to keep creating things that last our lifetime and beyond, quality goods with style that you can pass down for many generations,” she says. “The most important part of Wyatt for me is that I make women feel good about themselves. I want them to be able to be proud of wearing Wyatt.”
The Daily, made in America of merino wool, combines function and fashion. Says Tuohy: “You’ll quickly decide it’s your perfect shirt from sun to stars.”
For more information on Wyatt Outdoors, visit wyattoutdoors.com.
From our April 2025 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy Chloe Nostrant Photography
