Outdoor Startups Community

We started Madera Outdoor in 2016 with a single hammock and a simple idea: build great gear, plant trees with every order, and grow by paying people — not ad platforms. Since then we've sold millions of dollars of gear, planted over 200,000 trees with our partners at Trees for the Future, and built a community of customers and ambassadors who genuinely love the outdoors.

We didn't do it with big ad budgets. We did it with systems: an ambassador program that rewards real people for sharing what they love, an email community we actually write to like humans, and a decade of hard-won e-commerce lessons. Now we're opening those systems up to other outdoor startups.

How we help startups

An audience that already buys outdoor gear. Partner brands get featured to our email community and social following — real customers, not cold traffic.

Ambassadors, not ads. Our ambassador program pays people 10% commission with 90-day tracking to spread the word. It's the engine behind our growth, and we help startups plug into the same model instead of renting attention from Facebook.

The playbook, shared openly. Email flows that actually sell, launch sequences, pre-orders, fulfillment lessons (including the expensive ones) — we share what worked and what didn't, so you don't have to learn it the hard way.

A mission bigger than any one brand. Everything we do plants trees. Working with us connects your startup to that mission and to a community that cares about keeping wild places wild for the next generation.

How working together works

  1. Apply below. Tell us what you make and where you're at.
  2. We review for fit. Honest gear, real founders, outdoors focus. We read every application ourselves.
  3. Intro call. We talk about your goals and which of our systems can help — audience features, ambassador activation, email, launches.
  4. Plug in. Cross-promotions, ambassador campaigns, and community features, run together.
  5. Grow, and share it back. What works gets shared with the whole community. We all get stronger.

Who this is for

Early-stage outdoor brands — gear, apparel, and experiences — building something real. If you're drop-shipping knockoffs or greenwashing, this isn't your community. If you're out there making honest products for people who'd rather be outside, we should talk.

Apply to join

Questions first? Reply to any of our emails or reach us through the contact page — a human answers.