OUR STORY
"I wanted leather that matched how I live the rest of my life. Local, connected to this land, accountable to it. That leather didn't exist. So we built it."
CATE HAVSTAD-CASAD, FOUNDER
It started with a hat, and a number I couldn't forget.
I was 22 when I founded Havstad Hat Company. For a decade, custom western hats were my craft, my livelihood, my daily practice. I built pieces for some of the biggest names in country music, some of which now live in the Country Music Hall of Fame. I loved this work, creating tactile talismans infused with story, personality and longevity.
In 2020, I was working to build a luggage piece to help transport my hats. A leather bag that was as beautiful as it was functional, and sourced and produced in a way that aligned with my values. But the leather I was looking for did not exist.
What I found instead was a number. Over five million cattle hides go to waste in the United States every year. Animals already raised for meat, hides already separated, going to landfills or incinerators simply because no one had built the connections to catch them. I kept sitting with that. Five million. Every year.
I couldn't let it go.
Turns out, I already had the answer.
Alongside my hat business, I was living on a farm with my husband, Chris. We’re both first-generation farmers, and spent years transforming what was a three-acre market garden into a 1,400-acre regeneratively managed operation. I've watched up close what happens when you pay attention to land: the grasses come back fuller. The soil gets darker and holds more rain. Creatures return that haven't been seen in years. It happens slowly, quietly, over seasons, like something remembering what it used to be.
The rangelands of the American West cover more than half the land on Earth. They are among the most ecologically generous landscapes we have, and they are almost never part of the conversation about what fashion could do differently.
That gap started to feel like an opening.
Four years. One supply chain. From scratch.
Since 2021, we have been building what didn't exist: a direct path from regenerative American ranches to finished leather goods, where every hide is known and every hand it passed through is accountable. That meant getting to know the ranchers and their unique businesses. It meant finding tanneries who would keep careful records for every batch. It meant figuring out, step by step, how to hold a lineage together. From the pasture in the American West to the person carrying the finished piece.
Our partner ranches work with independent verifiers who visit annually and measure what's actually happening in the soil and the grasses and the water. Not paperwork. A person, walking the land, taking notes, tracking progress.
We don't design by season. Every product is meant to be carried for decades, by one person throughout their lifetime and handed down to another after that.
Revolutions can be beautiful. Design can be a force for good. Businesses in support of biodiversity and circularity are the future.
What's in a name?
RANGE (noun): the open grasslands that hold some of the world's greatest stores of life and quiet potential.
REVOLUTION (verb): the turn of a cycle, the restoration of a system, the refusal to accept what's broken.
We named this company in hopes of what it will become. The leather is a way in. A tangible talisman that connects you to the land and the people tending it. When you carry something made from Range Revolution leather, you're rooting yourself to the mission of something greater. Participating in choices that shape the future we wish to see.
The beginning of what's possible.
We're a small team of dreamers and doers, investing in a vision of careful creation and consumption. We're building our supply chain as a way of showing what a different relationship between land and goods might look like.
If that sounds like something you want to be part of, you're in the right place.