Troop Chic

Demetrios Coupounas, an avid outdoorsman and entrepreneur, dreamed of tapping into the money spigot known as the Pentagon. But until last year he had come up parched. A co-founder of GoLite--a privately held outdoor-gear firm based in Boulder, Colo.--Coupounas tried to sell military purchasers on his company's lightweight tents, backpacks and sweat-wicking T shirts. But even after calling evaluators at the Army's gear-testing center in Natick, Mass., meeting with sales reps who hawk wares to the military and calling Navy SEAL officers directly, he had booked just a handful of individual sales to a fighter here and there.

Shortly after the war in Afghanistan, however, Coupounas set up a booth at an outdoor-gear trade show in Anaheim, Calif., and to his surprise, some of the same military buyers who had rebuffed him for years came clamoring for his goods. He started selling small batches of GoLite undergarments to special-forces units. Today he says he has a thriving military business, accounting for 10% of his roughly $5 million in annual sales. "We don't actively design for the military," says Coupounas, 37, who climbs 14,000-ft. mountains to personally test his firm's new products. "They just happen to like our stuff."

With the military under orders to get lighter and faster, several companies that make gear for outdoor-adventure athletes are booking sales to special-forces units assigned everywhere from Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains to the Philippine jungles. "Private companies are leading in the R. and D. of this stuff," says Colonel Tom Blume, director of procurement for U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Fla. "We love off-the-shelf items because we don't have to put R. and D. into them."

The core customers for extreme-sports gear--climbers, adventure racers, trekkers, mountain bikers--torture their clothing and equipment and constantly tell firms how to improve it, demanding tighter seams, tougher fibers, better fit and lighter weight. As the gear has improved, the commandos have latched on. The North Face recently added a camouflage fly to one of its expedition tents in the hope of making more military sales. In every other way, says Jill Pagliaro, a spokeswoman for North Face, "the design for Alpine athletes and military usage is similar."

Unlike giant defense contractors, many extreme-sports-gear companies are privately held and can't afford to hire Washington lobbyists or navigate the thickets of red tape involved in bidding for government contracts. Instead, they're getting their gear into military exchanges and booking sales to individual troops who want the equipment and pay for it out of their pockets. Army soldiers and Marines, for instance, are allowed to buy a handheld global positioning system, or GPS, unit (shown above) or sweat-wicking T shirts to wear under their fatigues.