Renovating Trusted Gear Co. for Growth

Trusted Gear Co is a local Kalispell business that specializes in retailing premium, imported European workwear. They’re a first choice for many local businesses outfitting crews with high-quality jobsite gear— and for customers who need apparel they can rely on.

The high-quality line is hard to find in the Flathead Valley, even though there’s a large population that uses industrial apparel like the kind Blaklader specializes in.

— Joshua Maltby, speaking to The Daily Interlake. (2021)

But their online store was lagging behind: an outdated Shopify theme, disorganized navigation, and an impressive catalog of ~800 products that didn’t feel like 800 products. It was taking too much work for consumers & businesses to find the gear they needed, resulting in a store that felt 10% the size that it really was.

The old Trusted Gear Co homepage, before the redesign.

Growing as a business also means communicating that growth— and Trusted Gear Co had their sights set on growth for 2026.

So, when Trusted Gear Co came to Aether Fox Studio for upgrading their brand & online presence, we jumped in. With their ambitions for growth and our mission to elevate local businesses, it was the perfect project to take on.

Our Objectives With This Project

To tailor Trusted Gear Co for their 2026 ambitions, we set our sights on accomplishing the following:

• Creating a more visual brand image
• Information architecture refresh + navigation overhaul
• Product data audit + enrichment
• Brand new site build

Defining a Trusted Brand

If you were asked what you thought of a person, you’d probably respond with a handful of traits loosely describing how their personality makes you feel: funny, reliable, meticulous, always a bit late. Brands are like people in this way, and to define a brand is to try your best to tailor that image with purpose. Unlike people, if this is what you do with your own personality, that’s between you and your therapist.

So what traits do we want the Trusted Gear Co brand to communicate? Their catalog makes this answer an easy one: premium, rugged and trustworthy for work.

With an idea of the traits/personality we wanted the brand to impart on its visual identity, we move on to the logo.

The Logo

The logo as it stood was good, incorporating many interesting elements in a unique way that felt fitting for the brand, and wore well on a t-shirt. It’s a hammer-shaped “T”, and a “G” laid on top of each other and slightly vertically offset, resembling the shape of a shield.

We leaned into the existing logo elements, while making it wider and introducing a sharper and more geometric style that felt more modern and premium. The new logo is more versatile, working well in a variety of contexts and sizes, while still retaining the rugged character that makes it unique.

The Colors

The color palette needed to echo a brand that felt premium yet rugged, so we leaned into a warm palette inspired by safety colors often seen on worksites, but with a more refined tone.

Typography

A rugged brand needs strong typography to boot, a set of typefaces that demand attention and communicate reliability. So we experimented, again and again until we found a combination that felt just right.

• For primary headings, we selected Purista, a semi tech-inspired sans-serif typeface with a strong presence.
• For secondary and alternate headings, we chose Teko, a similar sans-serif with a more condensed form, which is to be used with increased letter spacing/tracking- perfect for subheadings and accents.
• For body text and general use, Inter is a tried and true typeface that’s legible and versatile.

Once the identity elements were defined, we moved on to ideating the online experience.

Envisioning the Online Experience

With a brand identity defined and a clear vision for the future, we turned our sights to the online shopping experience itself. The goal was to build a site that felt trustworthy, premium, easy to navigate and expansive—a site that portrayed a business larger than it is, and centered around its massive catalog.

Crafting the Navigation

The target audiences for Trusted Gear Co as defined earlier are twofold: businesses outfitting crews, and individual consumers looking for reliable workwear. The challenge was to create an experience that catered to both audiences, without alienating either. This we looked to achieve by focusing on an Amazon-like shopping experience, combined with a navigation structure that anticipated businesses. In addition, we ensured front and center placement of Trusted Gear’s business services in the header and footer.

The top level of a navigation structure is always a challenge, because we want to naturally guide users down a path that makes sense for them, so we need to think about the first set of doors we present to them.

If someone is looking for a set of high-visibility vests, the typical doors presented would be something like:

Mens > Vests > High Visibility.

But what if we can anticipate the audience better, and present a better first set of doors? How about this:

Safety Gear > High Visibility Vests.

This way, we’re not presenting unnecessary steps to a userbase where most of them are looking for safety gear first and foremost, gender options later. Scaling that approach across the entire catalog—while keeping everything scannable at a glance—was the guiding constraint for the new navigation.

To further enhance the shopping experience, we imagined something we haven’t seen done before: customizing vendor presences on the site beyond just a logo. Each vendor on the site has its own branding elements echoed across product cards and pages, creating a more dynamic and engaging experience that highlights the unique qualities of each brand Trusted Gear Co carries.

Rebuilding The Catalog

Having a product catalog is one thing, but having a well-organized and data-rich catalog is another. Our ambitions for navigation and filtering required a deep dive into each of its ~800 products to ensure that every item had complete and accurate data. This meant auditing each product for missing information, ensuring that every item was categorized correctly, and updating the existing data types to be more organized, useful and visual.

After completing the data audit, we utilized the search & discovery app to take advantage of as much of the enriched product data as possible to achieve our robust vision for navigation and filtering.

Building The New Site

The new site was built on top of a base Shopify theme called Outlet, which provided a solid foundation for building a fast, reliable and user-friendly online store fit for a large catalog. From there, we customized the theme extensively to align with the new brand identity and navigation structure we had developed.

Why This Work Matters

This valley is full of local businesses trying to do big things, and Trusted Gear Co is no exception. By investing in their brand and online presence, they’re positioning themselves for growth in a competitive market dominated more and more by big-box retailers. This work not only helps Trusted Gear Co stand out, but also empowers them to better serve their customers— both local businesses and individual consumers alike.

Additionally, this project contributes to setting an online standard for local businesses in the Flathead Valley. By showcasing what a well-executed online presence can look like, we’re hoping to inspire other local businesses to invest in their own digital storefronts, ultimately strengthening the local economy, fostering community pride and making them more competitive against larger, impersonal retailers.