Bridget Kilgallon, Olivia Martens, and Lauren Breitenbach
Co-Founders, Têra Kaia
The Basics
Company Name: Têra Kaia
Location: San Diego, CA
Founded: 2016 (Formerly Arêt Basewear)
Full-Time Employees: 0 - we’re in the initial pre-growth stage
Products: Outstanding outdoor sports bras.
Social: Instagram / Facebook
Claim to Fame: Têra Kaia is redefining the way clothes fit and function, and encouraging you to get outdoors and be your outside self. We are known for having designed and produced the world's most comfortable swim-friendly outdoor sports bra that we call “Basewear”.
The Culture
The best thing about working here is:
Having a positive impact on our customer’s lives which is evident in the daily reviews, happy emails, and interesting adventure stories we get from people almost every single day. Examples include: tons of customers who have thrown out their other sports bras and replaced them with basewear tops, a woman with medical complications who’s breathing is finally unrestricted by a bra. An adaptive athlete who hiked the PCT in our basewear top. An expert climber who wore the same basewear top for over a month while traveling in a van, and didn’t smell gross (true story), several expecting mothers who can only wear our Basewear top into the late stages of pregnancy, as it’s comfortable and adaptive to body changes. This is just to name a few
When we’re not working, we’re:
Being our outside selves!
What we’re reading:
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, The Women Who Run With The Wolves
What we’re listening to:
Our road trip playlist (you can find it on Spotify as the Arêt 2019 Road Trip Mix - we also have one for 2018). The mix is a mixture of several genres from drum n’ bass, to Metallica, to Earth Wind and Fire best suited for long road trips to outdoor spaces.
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
Dance parties during work hours are OK here.
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
By creating inclusion in the outdoors we’re inviting in new perspectives, opinions, and life experiences to make a broader perspective. With a wider variety of life experiences to learn from we become better as a human species, and learn to work together for the future of the people and the planet we occupy.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
We’ve encouraged thousands of people to get outdoors and be their outside selves. Our mission is to create clothes that improve the person’s ability to move efficiently through any outdoor environment or terrain without being held back by their clothes. We want our customers to feel beautiful in their own skin, proud of their uniqueness, and delighted by garments that fit them perfectly. We hope each basewear top (and other planned products) goes through tons of adventures, and makes lots of memories. We want our customers to love their clothes again, extending the lifespan of the garment, and reducing the impact of the industry on our planet. Our specific goals as a company are to launch a formal team of athletes and influencers of diverse backgrounds and experiences, launch our full planned product lines, improve the sustainability of our fabric, and get into major retailers.