Minus33: 110 Years of Wool, Built for the Outdoors
Some outdoor brands build a heritage story around a few decades of experience. Minus33 can trace its knowledge of wool back more than a century.
Behind the New Hampshire-based Merino wool brand is L.W. Packard Company, a fifth-generation family business founded in Ashland, New Hampshire, in 1916. Long before Minus33 existed, L.W. Packard was manufacturing woolen fabric for names like Brooks Brothers, Pendleton, and L.L.Bean. At its peak, the mill employed around 400 people.
The textile industry eventually changed. Synthetic materials grew in popularity, manufacturing moved overseas, and domestic mills struggled to compete with lower-cost global production. L.W. Packard adapted, but the family’s knowledge of wool never went away.
More than a century after the company began, that expertise has become the foundation for a very different kind of outdoor brand.
Born at Minus 33 Degrees
The story behind the Minus33 name says a lot about the company itself.
Fourth-generation owner John Glidden is a textile engineer, hunter, and outdoorsman. During a snowmobile trip in New Hampshire’s North Country, he was field testing early Merino wool base layers when the wind chill dropped to negative 33 degrees. The layers performed, and the conditions ultimately provided the name for the brand.
Minus33 officially launched in 2002, beginning with a relatively simple product: a midweight Merino wool base layer consisting of a long-sleeve top and bottom. The combination became the company’s flagship product and eventually expanded into the much larger collection Minus33 offers today. But the important part of the story isn’t simply that John discovered Merino wool worked in cold weather. His background as a textile engineer meant he understood why it worked and how to make it better.
As Minus33’s Mike Bednaz explained during our conversation, “We basically taught the mills how to make it better.” Today, Minus33 still has two textile engineers on staff, bringing a level of technical textile knowledge that is increasingly unusual in an outdoor apparel industry dominated by brands sourcing products from third-party manufacturers.
A Different Kind of Outdoor Brand
Spend enough time shopping for outdoor clothing and you’ll notice that a lot of brands sell more than performance. They’re selling an identity. Minus33 isn’t particularly interested in that game.
“We are not a fashion brand. We are not a prestige brand.”
Branding on the clothing is intentionally minimal. You’re not buying a Minus33 base layer because you want everyone on the mountain to know what logo you’re wearing. You’re buying it because you want a high-quality Merino layer that performs.
That philosophy extends to how the company thinks about competition. Mike identified three things that Minus33 customers continually respond to: quality, affordability, and customer service.
While many outdoor brands compete by releasing new styles, colors, and collections, Minus33 takes a more measured approach. The company typically introduces only a handful of new products each year. Its focus is less on constantly reinventing the product line and more on getting the products it already makes right.
Mike described the company simply: “We’re kind of a no-nonsense brand.”
That might be one of the best ways to understand Minus33.
Merino Made for Real Life
Merino wool has become a staple of modern outdoor apparel for good reason. It helps regulate temperature, manages moisture, resists odor, and works across an unusually wide range of conditions.
For Minus33, however, performance isn’t enough if the clothing becomes a hassle to own.
Most of the company’s products are designed to be machine washed and dried, something that differentiates them from Merino garments that require more careful washing and hang drying. As Mike joked, if you accidentally hit a Minus33 piece with high heat, “it’s not going to shrink to the size of a postage stamp.”
The product range has also expanded far beyond the cold-weather base layers that started the brand. Different fabric weights allow customers to choose pieces for different conditions, including lightweight warm-weather products such as sun hoodies, T-shirts, underwear, and tank tops.
Who Wears Minus33?
Minus33’s customer base is broader than you might expect.
There are the obvious customers: hunters, hikers, skiers, guides, outdoor professionals, military members, veterans, first responders, and others who spend enough time outside to understand the importance of a dependable base layer. Those professional communities have also become some of Minus33’s strongest word-of-mouth advocates.
Then there are customers who simply want to be comfortable. Some have been wearing wool for decades. Others discover Minus33 while researching Merino for an upcoming trip. Someone might call the company’s New Hampshire customer service team and say they’re going to Iceland for two weeks but have no idea what layers they need. Instead of simply pointing them toward a product page, the team will ask where they’re going, what they’ll be doing, how much time they’ll spend outside, and then help them build the appropriate layering system.
That human interaction matters for a 22-person company competing against some of the largest names in outdoor apparel.
“The biggest thing is we are here to help.”
It is an old-school approach to customer service from a company with an equally old-school commitment to its product.
Bringing Wool Manufacturing Back to New Hampshire
Perhaps the most interesting part of Minus33’s next chapter is happening back where the story began. After decades in which so much American textile manufacturing moved overseas, Minus33 has begun bringing portions of production back to New Hampshire. The company’s Mountain Heritage socks are manufactured in Ashland using modern knitting equipment installed at Minus33’s own facility. The company has since begun producing Merino scarves there and is expanding into knit beanies as well.
Turning Old Wool Into Emergency Gear
Minus33’s relationship with the outdoors extends beyond selling apparel. Through its Search and Rescue Warming Kit program, the company takes gently used returns and factory seconds and turns them into emergency kits for search and rescue organizations. Each kit provides warming layers that rescuers can carry into the backcountry for someone facing exposure or hypothermia.
As demand for the program grew, Minus33 ran into an unusual problem: its return volume wasn’t high enough to supply all the requested kits. So the company opened the program to other brands. Consumers can now send in qualifying wool apparel from other companies, giving clothing that might otherwise sit unused or be thrown away another purpose. The garments can be patched, repackaged, and eventually carried into the mountains by rescue teams.
It’s a practical approach to sustainability that feels consistent with the rest of the company. Rather than simply talking about reducing waste, Minus33 found a way to make old products useful again while supporting the people who keep outdoor communities safe.
110 Years In, Minus33 Is Still Growing
Minus33 isn’t trying to become the flashiest name in outdoor apparel. It doesn’t need to.
The company has something difficult for competitors to replicate: more than a century of textile knowledge, five generations of family ownership, a physical connection to New Hampshire’s wool manufacturing history, and people inside the company who genuinely understand the materials they’re working with.
Now, that history is becoming a bigger part of the future. Minus33 plans to put more emphasis on its heritage and the people behind the brand as it moves toward 2027, telling more stories about the old mill, its machinery, the people who worked there, and the people carrying that knowledge forward today.
At the same time, the company is expanding domestic production, moving into a new facility, developing new products, and introducing a refreshed brand identity designed to better represent how much Minus33 has grown beyond cold-weather apparel.
Through all of those changes, the philosophy behind the product seems remarkably consistent.
Performance over prestige. Quality over constant newness. And more than a century after L.W. Packard began working with wool in Ashland, New Hampshire, Minus33 is still finding ways to make it better.
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