While Pat MacDonald and Trav Mueller’s home States of Michigan and North Dakota aren’t the first two places that come to mind when you think of heat and dense humidity, those cold-weather climates were the beginning of a lifelong journey that culminated into a booming business idea, called HUMID OUTSIDE, an apparel brand designed to make you feel and look cool year-round.
Pat grew up in Michigan where hunting, fishing, and boating were all part of his outdoor line-up of adventure, and that continued when his family moved to the Tampa, Florida area. Similarly, Trav comes from a small town in North Dakota where adventure was only scarce if you chose not to pursue it.
One might say they were both pursuing an elevated lifestyle at a very young age.
Although their paths didn’t cross until later in life, they both coincidently chose to join the military and live life on the water, with Pat in the Coast Guard and Trav in the Navy.
After the military, Pat spent years as a serial entrepreneur, experiencing the ups and downs of several businesses before lunging at an opportunity to work as a Field Engineer building power plants. Years earlier, Trav was also a Field Engineer within the same company and quickly rose into an Executive leadership role.
In 2012, the pair would finally meet during some adverse circumstances on a project site in Australia. A bond was quickly formed and it was clear that the two had the ability to go far together. Pat and Trav worked together to take on some of the company’s biggest challenges, including a mega-project in Egypt, where they would lead construction teams building 1 Gigawatt of power in less than two years!
The two had countless conversations, most commonly over cold beers, where they would talk about one day having a business of their own. In 2019, having boats and spending time out on Tampa Bay with their families, they felt there was a gap in high-quality apparel designed for boaters and fishermen and a gap overall in clothing that felt comfortable and performed well in humid climates.
So, with their engineering backgrounds, they launched the research and development in the summer of 2019 and developed their first prototype shortly thereafter. Thus a new company, Humid Outside, was born.
