Famous brands from Utah, and where each one started

Start with Skullcandy. Rick Alden and Cris Williams launched it in Park City in 2003, and its first product, the Portable Link, debuted at that year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Mill Road Capital took the company private in 2016 for $196.9 million. Skullcandy still works out of Park City, in an office it says sits at exactly 6,434 feet. That is a very precise number for a headphone company to know.

Cricut makes the cutting machine that turned a lot of kitchen tables into small sign shops. It grew out of Provo Craft, a Utah County craft business, which introduced the first Cricut cutter in 2005 and had the best sales year in its history in 2006. Cricut is now public and run from South Jordan. Its 2025 annual report counted nearly 5.9 million active users.

Owala's FreeSip bottle comes from Lehi, by way of a protein shaker. In 2000 Steve Sorensen bent a piece of wire from a hardware store into the first BlenderBall whisk, and he and his wife, Kim, built BlenderBottle around it. Their company, now called Trove Brands, first sold the FreeSip water bottle under the BlenderBottle name. It sold poorly and was pulled. Relaunched in 2020 as Owala, the same idea made Time's list of the best inventions of 2023. The second name worked better.

Kodiak Cakes dates itself to 1982, when eight-year-old Joel Clark went door to door with a red wagon, selling brown paper bags of flapjack mix. The company is run from Park City. It appeared on Shark Tank in 2014 and left without a deal. Sales had been $6.7 million that year, and by 2019 they were just under $160 million, so walking away aged well. Private equity firm L Catterton bought a majority stake in May 2021, and the founders and managers kept a significant minority share.

Cotopaxi, the backpack and jacket company with the llama logo, was founded in Salt Lake City in 2014 and is a certified B Corporation. The full list of brands that began here, famous or not, is on Founded in Utah.

Yes, and they are two of the most famous names the state has produced, but you won't find either one in this directory. Crumbl was started in 2017 by cousins Sawyer Hemsley and Jason McGowan while Hemsley was a student at Utah State University in Logan. Swig opened its first soda shop in a small building in St. George on April 2, 2010.

Both are restaurant chains. Beehive Made lists brands you can buy as a product and take home, so a cookie shop and a drive-through soda stand fall outside the lines, however long the line at the window gets.

Traeger is run from Salt Lake City, but it did not start here. Joe Traeger ran a heating company in Oregon when he invented the wood pellet grill, and Traeger's annual report dates the invention to 1987. For almost three decades after that, Traeger was an Oregon company.

In September 2015 Traeger moved its headquarters from Portland to the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake City. The man who moved it was Jeremy Andrus, who had spent years as CEO of Skullcandy. He told the Deseret News^4,16,20 he had been "continually impressed by the strength of Utah's talent pool." So in a roundabout way, Skullcandy recruited Traeger. Traeger's annual report now lists its offices on 400 West in Salt Lake City.

NordicTrack took a longer road. Ed and Florence Pauls started it in 1975 in Chaska, Minnesota, after Ed built a ski machine in his garage. The company that owned it filed for bankruptcy in 1998, and ICON Health & Fitness, based in Logan, bought NordicTrack's patents and trademarks for $9.5 million. ICON renamed itself iFIT in 2021 and still runs NordicTrack from Logan.

Black Diamond is the climbing-gear version of the same pattern. Employees of Chouinard Equipment took the company over in 1989, renamed it Black Diamond and moved it to Salt Lake City "to be at the base of the Wasatch mountains," as Black Diamond's history puts it. Brands like these are tagged headquartered in our directory, not founded.

Two of the better-known ones make furniture and shoes.

Lovesac started in 1995, when Shawn Nelson made bean bag-style chairs by hand in Salt Lake City and delivered them to other students at the University of Utah. Lovesac filed for Chapter 11 in January 2006 and came out of it that August. The same year it moved its headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut, while it raised private equity money there.

Altra Running was founded in Utah in 2009 by Golden Harper, Brian Beckstead, Jeremy Howlett and Quirl Jacob Hansen. The idea was a zero drop shoe, with the heel and toe at the same height. Icon Health & Fitness bought Altra in March 2011. VF Corporation bought it in June 2018, and Altra is now run from Denver.

Neither move was a protest. Altra now sits inside a much bigger company, and Lovesac went where its money was. We keep a running list of these departures on brands that left Utah, with the year each one went.

Mostly not, and the companies say so in their own filings.

Traeger's latest annual report says its grills are made in China and Vietnam, about 80 percent of them in China. The pellets are another story. The same report says "substantially all" of Traeger's consumables are made in the United States. Cricut's report says its machines, accessories and materials come from contract manufacturers located mainly in Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea.

A few famous names still build here. Lifetime Products, which Barry Mower started after he built a sturdier basketball pole for his own backyard in 1972, is based in Clearfield's Freeport Center and makes tables and hoops there, alongside plants in China and Tennessee. Blendtec²⁶, the Orem company whose Will It Blend videos put iPhones and golf balls into a blender, says small teams build and box every blender from start to finish under one roof.

If "made here" is what you care about, the Made in Utah list sorts for that and nothing else. Only a few of the famous names in this piece are on it.