everyone in boulder has this idea
zach ran in high school, played soccer in college, and lived in san francisco straight out of school before moving to colorado in 2017. he did what everyone in colorado does: ski, bike, run, every free hour outside. bikes came first. when covid hit, it was running, more and more of it, on the trails around boulder.
my joke is that everyone in boulder has the idea to start this brand.
— zach colby, founder, dust
half the people you run with on the boulder trails work in the industry, and the gap they kept talking about was obvious once you saw it. early covid was when a wave of new urban, east coast running brands took off. the west had brands too, but they were technical mountain brands. nobody was making that newer kind of running brand for people who run the way people in boulder run: outside, exploring, as much for the fun of it as for the fitness.
zach describes the dust runner more precisely now. on one side are the hyper optimized performance brands. on the other are the brands built around jogging together for fun. the person he makes clothes for sits in between: goes hard, likes to run fast occasionally, enjoys exploring on winding trails more than the urban grid, and has a whole social life that doesn’t only optimize for running.
i'm gonna go hard. i can run a fast marathon, but i don't really give a shit.
what that translates to is the person who does a serious mountaineering day in a cotton popover and is not stressed about how light their pack is. or, as he put it on our first call, someone who runs really hard and then, at the end of the day, is not checking a sleep score but having a couple of beers with friends.
dust gear may or may not enhance mustachioed running performance
that runner still needs gear that works, and that is the line drawn in dust. zach wants to make genuinely great technical running apparel while rejecting the obsessive optimization culture that has grown up around the sport. dust takes the products seriously. it just doesn’t take itself too seriously.
seventy percent go uncontested
before dust, zach worked in politics, on the independent side. first he worked for the serve america movement, a good governance group that was trying to build a moderate coalition. they worked on electoral reform like ranked choice voting and open primaries, ran ballot initiatives in a few states, and supported independent candidates for mayor and town council in small towns and cities.
then he worked for the forward party, on bigger jurisdictions and bigger races. the through line was the same. something like 70 percent of elected seats in the country go uncontested, so a lot of the work was helping candidates run where the other side had nobody at all. it meant pulling every lever for moderation it could and seeing what worked. he calls it an experiment, and says it still is one.
he enjoyed it. the problems were interesting, and so was the human side, the personalities and the power dynamics. but living in that information ecosystem every day wore him out, and he did not want to spend his career there. when he tried to network his way into sports and the outdoors, he realized it would mean a bad entry level job and a pay cut. so he hit the ground running and decided to make his own job.
he did not leave the campaign work behind. he brought the playbook with him. the way dust is built, from the van to the events to the slow, deliberate drops, comes straight out of grassroots organizing.
you can't outspend them
ask zach what carried over from campaigns to clothes and he goes straight to the obvious one.
you're coming up against these big boy competitors, and you can't outspend them. you have to outthink and outsmart them and do things that they can't do.
the first thing campaigns taught him is how to live with rejection. he is totally okay with hearing no or being ignored, and he thinks building a brand takes a long time and plenty of both. you keep showing up until people trust you, finally listen, or something lands. he has done events where two people showed up and events where 100 did, and he treats both as reps towards the goal.
the second is the experimenting. zach came into apparel as an outsider with no playbook, so he tries things people have not done and figures it out as he goes, the same way an underdog campaign tests what works.
the third is the ground game itself, which he says is the part of the job that fills his cup most. creating a connection, building community, one conversation at a time. a conversation does not have to move the business forward to count.
you can have an interaction with someone that leaves them thinking, oh, that was cool. that brand's cool. i like that guy.
and then, as he puts it, one becomes two becomes four. that is how a campaign builds a base, and it is how dust is building its customers. the last thing that carried over is being a jack of all trades: websites, software, admin, all the blocking and tackling of running a mostly online business on your own. when the stock lives in what he calls a bedroom warehouse, you have to be prepared to be ceo and order packer.
a van on the move
the dust bus is a 1995 econoline van. zach shopped around for vans for a while, having romanticized van life like a lot of people, and settled on one that had a lot of soul. it used to be a sonoma county sheriff's tactical vehicle. he bought it on facebook marketplace and covered it in decals, and the first thing people usually say when they see it is that the van is freaking sick.
dust bus is rolling
the setup is simple: a rack, a couple of boxes of clothes, and a cooler of drinks for afterward. the rest depends on who he partners with and where. worst case, people have a good run together, see the van, and remember it. best case, they buy a bunch of gear on the spot and leave thinking they like the brand.
one added flavor
group runs are everywhere now, so zach has one rule for his events.
do one thing that bumps it a level up from just a normal group run.
he does not overbuild it or make it complicated. it’s a great call out to western cowboy ethos and the simplicity of living life on the trail. it is one extra layer, and he likes the ones that work for both kinds of people who show up. at a beer mile you can try to break six minutes or split it as a two person relay and hang out. on a peak tagging run around san francisco, some people do a lap with friends and some go as hard as they can.
his favorite event right now is friday night lights, a nighttime cycling and running relay in a state park in the east bay three days before we talked. he partnered with an east bay cycling collective and a guy who puts on cyclocross races around the bay, brought a speaker, and got cyclists and runners out together. he admits it might be recency bias. the other event he brings up is a trail beer mile in bend, oregon, before dust had even launched. 75 to 80 people came out. he bought what seemed like a ridiculous amount of beer and they still ran out.
he used to chase every group he partnered with. now a lot of them come to him. he does not have the data to prove that event customers stick around longer, but he has seen it: a handful of superfans who came to an event and now order every new thing as soon as it drops.
if you can eventually get a thousand of those, then you have a business. you have a durable lifestyle business.
another example of that one extra layer is that last black friday, instead of a discount code, dust ran a sale called run for your discount. between monday and friday you submitted a strava file of your longest run, and every mile took two percent off. a couple of people got everything free. one had been eyeing an fkt on a section of the appalachian trail, and on thursday morning he sent zach an 81 mile run. zach sent him a box of gear.
a naive curmudgeon
early on, before launch, zach wanted dust to be an underground, if you know you know brand with no social presence at all. reality changed his mind. people find new things on instagram. if someone tags along to a beer mile, has the best time, looks up the brand afterward and finds nothing, they forget about it forever.
i started as sort of a naive curmudgeon, and then realized i'm still running a business here.
so dust launched with instagram to facilitate connection, and zach still tries to keep what he posts from becoming a dopamine addled, optimized, reel friendly thing. the if you know you know idea did not go away. it moved into print. the first dust zine was built from photos and writing from the speed project, and inside it are a secret url and codes for products you cannot buy anywhere on the public site. you need the zine and that physical connection to get in.
a good buddy and a good factory
zach had never worked in apparel. his first attempts were blasting requests online and getting bad samples back. he signed up for an ai sourcing platform that no longer exists, which he thinks was just passing him through to alibaba factories.
early testing of a perforated logo
the factory that made his first run came through a college friend who runs a creative agency in austin. one of the people they worked with had been at an apparel development firm and had a relationship with a factory, and the two of them helped with a lot of the early designs. that factory made the mechanic's shirt, the cotton popover, the first quick draw shorts, and the hats.
for the second collection, zach worked with a different apparel development firm, which, it turns out, is in boulder, back where the nascent idea of dust started. nora, a designer there, worked with him on the design side of the women's line.
his takeaway is that good factories, like good brands, do not take every person on the internet with an idea. you get in through people that speak to you, that can connect on building the tech pack, or designing that route with them, and go through rounds of samples and type two fun until it is right.
eleven months
after the october 2025 launch, dust did not release anything new for eleven months. zach says that while he wanted to be deliberate, it was honestly bad from a momentum point of view, and partly him being a novice. he also still wanted to do it right and did not want to chase a monthly drop or spend his way through inventory with ad spend.
when new releases did come, they came all at once. there was the women's line, which nora helped design, a trail runner and designer in boulder who had always wanted to do a double drawcord on a pair of shorts. there was also a new men's tee, shorts and half tights. the last two months have been the best two dust has had. zach puts that down to a whole new category, a bigger audience than he had at launch, and the slow groundwork paying off. he admits he has said "slow and durable" a lot when describing the brand playbook. it’s a perfect playbook for surviving the wild west of upstart apparel brands.
the product is where dust’s seriousness shows. zach’s rule is the same as for events: one layer of something different on each piece, built on top of apparel that has to perform first. he is upfront that the half tights are the closest dust comes to what is already out there, and that the waistband is where he spent his effort. the one layer of different has stood out to the syndicate team in the samples we tested. one of us has run a 20 miler in them, a lot of it under six minute pace. the pockets held several gels without bouncing and the hem stayed put. another of us has been told at home to wear the cotton popover on every work call.
dust half tights - trail designed and road tested
next is a revamped popover with nicer cotton, upgraded trims and new colors, plus a windbreaker zach is clearly excited about. it has a mesh body under a thin nylon shell, vented pits, an open, bar tacked side seam and a cardigan collar. he expects both to miss the holiday sales rush, but they will be available for the coldest months of the year, when having the right gear in your trail pack is critical.
the facts of life
dust was born on the boulder trails, and zach launched it about four months after moving to san francisco in june 2025. he and his fiancée moved west for her career, a year in seattle first and then down to the bay. in his words, the facts of life took him back to the coast.
he still thinks of himself as a mountain person, and the mountains are a big part of where dust’s identity comes from. but he loves san francisco too. he runs most days in its hills, has put on plenty of events there, and is building a real community there. dust has customers in both places, with a retailer in missoula and trips back to colorado several times a year. what ties it together is not a zip code. it is an attitude toward running and getting outside, and that travels.
our take
we feature dust because zach goes out and meets people instead of buying their attention, and he can tell you exactly where he learned to work that way. a van, a cooler and one good idea for the night is a small budget. the people who come back for the next drop are what it buys, and the gear is good enough to keep them coming back.
if dust is successful, then 99% of its lifetime customers haven't heard of it yet.
we’re excited to be part of that group of early customers, rounding up new folks to share how important one key layer can be to keep that adventure feeling alive.
read more about dust on syndicate, or visit dust direct.