From Backyard Dye Pots to a Global Snow Brand: Lessons from Max Reade

In a recent episode of Like, Love, Share, Sherri sits down with Max Reade, the young founder behind a fast-growing baggy ski apparel brand, to unpack how a 16-year-old’s hunt for the perfect pair of pants turned into a full-fledged business. What emerges is less a tidy entrepreneurial playbook and more a vivid case study in curiosity, constraint, and creative persistence.

A problem on the mountain.

Max’s entry into entrepreneurship began, as many good ideas do, with a very specific problem.

“I’m a coach for the freestyle team at Mount Bachelor right now,” Max explains. “I ski a ton. I mean, I’ve skied a bunch since I was eight years old. And that’s kind of what got me into being a business owner because at the mountain, we were always like looking for baggy pants.”

At 16, nothing on the market fit the aesthetic he and his friends wanted. His workaround was both scrappy and revealing: “I’d order these like triple XL pants from Amazon… they were just really big around the waist and didn’t really fit that well.”

The breakthrough came when he stumbled onto $14 military surplus pants. “I got one pair for myself and I was like, these are perfect… they got that baggy fit, but they actually fit around my waist and they cinch around the ankles.”

The reaction from others was immediate and polarized. “People would either say, ‘yo, Max, where’d you get those pants?’… or they would be like, ‘what are those? Are those trash bags?’”

Accidental distribution, intentional hustle.

What began as personal experimentation quickly became a micro-business.

“So I ordered, I don’t know, like 10 of them when I was 16… and I started just reselling them for like 30 bucks.” Soon after, Max added a DIY production layer: backyard dyeing. “I was dying them in my backyard using this like massive pot and Rit dye… boil a big pot of dye, put the pants in, and then ring them out on a line.”

Demand kept growing. His brother began handling Instagram DMs and pushed Max to raise prices. “He was like, ‘Max, I think you could sell these for more.’… He was like, ‘Yeah, they’re 100 bucks.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, oh, that’s a great deal.’”

Then came the first supply shock. “One day I went to buy 20 pairs on Amazon again… and they were all sold out.” When he called the distributor, he learned the truth: “Those pants were just some like surplus that we found from the war back in like the 70s… and we don’t have any more of those.”

From resale to real manufacturing.

Forced to pivot, Max began reverse-engineering his product. “I started ripping them up… I made a pattern out of the old pants and… made them a little more boxy. And then I started sewing them myself.”

The economics were brutal. As Sherri points out, “They should be $500 or $1,000 if you’re hand making them.” Max laughs: “I was selling it for 150 but I was spending like 20 hours on each pair.”

A turning point came during a summer at Mount Hood, where Max connected with another young founder, Henry of Jib Skin. They collaborated on a 50-pair run, manufactured properly for the first time. “We did a drop on his website and we did a drop and they all sold out like super fast online. And it got me thinking like, I need a manufacturer.”

The next chapter arrived via an unlikely Instagram DM from a 19-year-old in Pakistan starting his own factory. Max was cautious: “I was really skeptical because I’ve heard a lot of things about Pakistan… I didn’t want any child labor involved. I didn’t want any unfair wages involved.”

After vetting the operation, he moved forward. “He helped me like iterate the design to make it the perfect baggy shape… where it fits around the waist and then it goes over your boots nicely and it just looks clean while you’re skiing.” They still work together today.

The Grom Pant: a sizing problem turned product.

One of the most revealing moments of the conversation is the origin of Max’s “Grom Pant.”

Last year, he mis-sized a production run. “I ordered like a size medium and I didn’t do a great job of actually sizing it out… these are tiny.” Customers complained. Exchanges piled up.

Rather than scrap the inventory, Max reframed it. “This year I still had a bunch of those pants left… so I decided to just make one product called Grom Pants… to make it really clear that these are small.” As Sherri jokes, “There’s a market.”

Drops over content.

On social strategy, Max is refreshingly blunt. He built the brand initially through consistent posting: “I would post… a couple of videos every week on Instagram… that really grew the brand.”

Today, he does far less content. “Now I don’t really make a ton of content. I just do the drop style… I just tell them, you know, pants are available now.” His main lever is owned channels: “I kind of push like signing up for texts… so I have like a big group of people subscribed to texts that get early access.”

TikTok Shop? Possibly. But not urgent. “I’ve looked into it… it’s probably a good idea. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it very much, honestly.”

Entrepreneur, skier, creator, or all three?

When Sherri asks whether he sees himself as a business owner or a creator, Max resists neat labels.

“I’d say I am maybe more of an entrepreneur… and also like I’m very creative… a content creator too.” More importantly, the business integrates his passions: “It’s been a really good way to combine many aspects of my life that I enjoy, like skiing, creativity, photography, videography and art.”

On college, ambition, and what’s next.

Max is clear-eyed about his path. “This was my dream to own a business when I was young… I don’t want to go to college and just do the thing that everyone says I should do.” At the same time, he’s not romantic about permanence. “I don’t know if I’m gonna be doing this forever… but yeah, that’s what I’m doing right now.”

Advice to his younger self.

The most resonant takeaway comes when Sherri asks what he would tell his 14-year-old self.

“I think people think about it too much and don’t actually step into their dreams… just start small and just go for it. You don’t have to build the website and everything. You just have to go for it.”

He adds a candid note about parental support: “Try to convince your parents that it’s really important to you… and if they say, ‘no, you gotta be in school,’ you gotta be persistent.”

Why this story matters.

Max’s journey isn’t about perfection or polish. It’s about experimentation under real constraints: sold-out inventory, sewing machine failures, sizing mistakes, and skeptical DMs. What stands out is his willingness to learn in public, iterate in messy conditions, and treat setbacks as signals rather than verdicts.

For young founders, creators, and anyone trying to build something from scratch, the episode offers a simple but powerful reminder: start with a problem you care about, move before you feel ready, and let the business reveal itself as you go.