Wyatt Outdoors Founder Colleen Tuohy Is Putting Ladies First

With her company, Wyatt Outdoors, Colleen Tuohy cowgirled her dream of stylish performance apparel for women into reality.

Text by Pam LeBlanc

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.”

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