A Visit with Poncho Outdoors

Poncho Outdoors has quickly become the go to shirt for anglers and those that enjoy the outdoors and outdoor lifestyle by simply crafting a better shirt. I spoke to Poncho Outdoors founder Clay Spencer (above) about his company, its shirts, and its future.

How did you go from Texas to Alaskan fishing guide to shirt magnate?

I went to UT and had a bunch of buddies there who liked to hunt and fish. By senior year, we were literally going somewhere in Texas every weekend to hunt or fish. What started out as a hobby…I wanted to have a real career, but before I’d go do that, I wanted to go hunt and fish in Alaska…I just packed up my stuff when I graduated and moved to Anchorage.

Who did you end up with?

I ended up with a guy named Jim Bailey. I jumped in his airplane and five minutes into my Alaska adventure nearly died. You get five minutes outside of Anchorage and you're in the middle of nowhere, we’re flying along and one in a million, another float plane perfectly perpendicular drops. I feel him pull back on the yoke and the plane goes vertical. And this, I mean, in the middle of nowhere, another airplane goes five feet directly underneath us. Never even saw us like, "Oh man, this is pretty wild. This is going to be an adventure."

How did you get back to Texas to start a shirt company?

I've always wanted to build a business. I think I finally came across the right idea and the right category to go do it in. Then also I was thinking, "Hey, I wear these fishing shirts all the time. I've got a bunch of complaints about them. I think I can make a better one, at least a marginally better one and maybe a lot better."

You state on your website that you felt like fishing shirts “fit like trash bags.”

I think that's largely true. I mean, there are mass market brands out there who are not focused on their customer in a deep way. They're just focused on putting as much product through their wholesale system as they can. We have a very different philosophy. It's like we really care about people who are out adventure fishing in the most extreme conditions in the world.

Which came up first? The fit, the styles, the fabric?

There is no fishing shirt in the world that offers different size fits. We're the only people in the world that do that. That's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's just at every step we're trying to go the extra mile for customers to give them what they want. The best performing shirt that fits. The biggest thing I was interested in doing was coming up with a fabric that was both soft and natural feeling, the way that a cotton shirt would be, but have all of those awesome performance features of a performance shirt. But so many of the performance shirts out there are really plastic feeling and just very unnatural. I wanted to build something, yeah, really soft and comfortable. That was actually the hardest part of the whole process.

Explain to me your company motto, "Everything you need and nothing you don't," as it pertains to shirts.

Yeah. The idea there is I'm not looking to make a shirt that has all these hoops and bells and whistles and looks like a gadget machine walking around. "Everything you need and nothing you don't" is this idea that we're putting all this stuff in there that you need, but we're not trying to look cool by adding a bunch of junk on there that's just a gimmick or made to look like you're fishing.

How many models does Poncho currently have?

I really think of it as just one shirt and a bunch of different colors. Our shirts, like 20 different colors, solids, plaids, camo.

What’s next for Poncho? Can you say?

Well, we can't say because we don't know. But I will tell you that there's nothing more fun than thinking about all the cool stuff that we could make in the hunting and fishing world. And so we're only going to release something new when we feel like we have substantially improved upon it enough and perfected it to a point where we can go out to the world and say, "Hey, we've made the best thing of X," whatever X is. Today, that's this shirt.

Visit Poncho Outdoors at ponchooutdoors.com

This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard in August 2020.

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