“We failed,” begins a letter from Will Watters, co-founder of the apparel maker Western Rise.
“After eight years of building Western Rise, we had great products, passionate customers and glowing reviews,” Watters wrote in an Oct. 16 note to customers. “But the truth is, it wasn’t enough. We had taken on too much, moved too fast and lost sight of the foundation.”
Western Rise sells men’s clothes that are meant for travel and are slightly upscale. An average pair of pants costs $130. The married couple Kelly and Will Watters, who met while they were ski instructors in Vail and later moved to Telluride, founded the company in 2015.
The business went bankrupt in June 2024. As the couple explained then, it had borrowed beyond its means, amassing $5.4 million in debt. Now, it is making a comeback.
“Kelly and I packed up our life in Colorado, grabbed our two-year-old and five-year-old, and moved to Vietnam,” Will Watters wrote. “Not for adventure. Not for comfort. But to rebuild Western Rise from the ground up. We moved into the chaos. The mills. The factories.”
“This is our second chance. And we’re betting everything on it,” according to the founder.
Western Rise’s unusual rebrand includes a seven-episode series of videos on YouTube called “The Journey,” which the now Saigon-based company bills as “a raw, unfiltered docuseries” filmed “through a global tariff war, factory chaos and family life in a foreign country.”
The relaunch also includes updated product lines featuring a few new linens, while maintaining the company’s focus on lightweight, breezy travelwear, as its online store shows.
The company’s ties to Telluride have thinned. Western Rise’s showroom in the mountain town is temporarily closed while its founders and executives are overseas, according to a spokeswoman. U.S. orders are fulfilled through its warehouse in Salt Lake City, for now.
“We are in the process of moving our entire warehouse here to Vietnam as well,” Will Watters says in the first episode of “The Journey,” noting that it’s easier to ship out of Vietnam.
“To be quite honest about it, I know a lot of our customers in the U.S. are concerned about that,” Kelly Watters says in the video, “but starting to ship it via FedEx and UPS from Vietnam is actually the same amount of time, if not less time in some cases, to get it to the U.S.”
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