Cotopaxi

Cotopaxi's first marketing department was two llamas from the online classifieds. The founders named them Coto and Paxi and took them to college campuses around Utah, where students took selfies with them and heard about a scavenger race called the Questival. Two weeks later, Davis Smith told Utah Business, 5,000 people showed up.

The race idea came from business school. At Wharton, Smith had created one in which classmates crossed from Belize to Panama doing challenges like "sandboarding down a volcano in Nicaragua." The company name came from a volcano too, the one near his childhood home in Quito, Ecuador.

Cotopaxi was not his first company. He and a cousin started PoolTables.com on about $20,000 borrowed from friends and family, and he sold it while in business school, where he also launched an online baby products store in Brazil. Before Cotopaxi, he spent 36 hours on his living room couch working out the idea. He chose a business over a nonprofit, and he told the Deseret News, "If I could go and build a business, I believed that I could make a difference in the world."

The money was the hard part. Impact investors turned him down, he said, because they "couldn't understand how I could be raising money equipped with only an idea and a PowerPoint." Venture capitalists said no many times before an investor known for backing Warby Parker agreed to lead a $3 million seed round. By 2016 the Deseret News reported that no benefit corporation had raised more from institutional investors.

Those bright colors are mostly somebody else's leftovers. According to Utah Business, most of that material came from other outdoor brands that share Cotopaxi's factories. The Del Día line takes it further. Each piece is made in the Philippines from remnant fabric by a worker who, in Cotopaxi's words, has "total creative control over the pack's colorway," so no two match.

Cotopaxi is a certified B Corp, and it says it gives 1 percent of annual revenue to the Cotopaxi Foundation, a Utah nonprofit. Bain Capital was among the investors in a $45 million round in 2021. Smith stepped down as CEO in 2023, and Lindsay Shumlas, who had been chief operating officer and chief financial officer, became CEO in 2024.

The company set up in Salt Lake City because Smith's wife chose it over Seattle and San Francisco. Llamas stayed in the picture, too. In 2016 one of Cotopaxi's best-selling jackets was made with llama wool from Bolivia.