Our Story

              Growing up, many of my weekends and vacations were spent splashing in the streams and lakes of the Adirondacks. When I was a baby, my parents bought an old hunting cabin in the middle of the Park. The building itself was small, only partially insulated, and had a few more rodent residents than many of our family friends would have preferred.

              Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t an admirer of the Great Outdoors at an early age. While many of my friends were vacationing on beaches and sleeping in state-of-the-art hotels, I was swatting mosquitos & sharing stories by the campfire (Looking back, I wish I could tell 8-year-old me that those were going to be some of the best memories).

One weekend, however, my Mom and I went to the local Kmart to grab last-minute supplies for our next trip to Camp. Of course, I didn’t want to go. In what I assume was an effort to quell my pouting, my Mom played a brilliant mind game with me; you might even call it a bribe.

              She pulled me down the camping aisle and we looked at all of the sweet gear we wouldn’t be buying. At the end of the aisle were these two aluminum fishing nets with lime green netting. She picked them up and said simply “These are really cool, right?”, and put them both in our cart – one for me and one for my older brother. “You guys can catch fish in the creek with them!”.

I wasn’t exactly sure why…but I was sold! I couldn’t wait to get up to Camp the next morning! It didn’t matter that the netting was too wide to catch any of the minnows in the creek. Those nets were the spur my imagination needed. Soon, I was inspired to become the best fisherman that creek had ever seen!

I actually never ended up catching any fish with that net - not that weekend or any other. Not a single of one of the Big Mouth bass leaping around in my head jumped into that net. But the excitement stayed with me. Rather than focus on the bugs or mice, I began to see the Great Outdoors for the magic that it held. From that weekend on, I was fascinated by the Wilderness and the Legends within (As I grew older, one Legend in particular became far and away my favorite…Any guesses?).

To this day, there isn’t a weekend where I don’t hope to get out and seek adventure in the Great Outdoors, especially in the Adirondacks. It seems clear to me that those early days had a direct hand in me finding my passion for exploring, conserving & nurturing that joy in others. And from this passion comes: The Squatch Brand – where we aim to provide unconventional goods that foster that childlike excitement for Mother Nature.

So, go on & go forth, Squatch Out and find your own adventure!                                                  

                              Jeremy Cross

Founder of The Squatch Brand

P.S. Those fishing nets are still hanging in the shed at my parent’s camp.