By Hiba Tahir
Photos by Chieko Hara

Fayetteville-based beardedgoat, a clothing brand that boasts 34,800 followers across Facebook and Instagram, is gaining traction across the country for its “technical and everyday apparel,” which encompasses everything from “flannel shackets” and boardshorts to “waffle beanies” and sun hats — a selection as varied as the team that envisioned it.

Honors alumnus Kile Graves (B.S.B.A., cum laude, ’16), who runs operations and finances for beardedgoat, heads a team that took the company from a startup that primarily sold screen-printed T-shirts and transformed it into a lifestyle brand. Owen Bell serves as the company’s creative and brand director, and McKane Martin (B.S.B.A., ’21) heads product development. 

Just over four years ago, Terry Turpin (B.A., ’92; J.D., ’95), vice president of commercial strategy at J.B. Hunt Transport Services, decided to start an e-commerce company in pursuit of his own brand. He named it after a pet bearded goat and brought Graves, Bell and Martin on board to take the reins. 

“He gave us the keys to reposition the company and basically run the day to day,” Graves explained. He and his partners decided to expand the company’s reach. Graves was up to the task thanks to his solid work experience in the retail sector. Through college, he worked at Walker Brothers, a longtime Northwest Arkansas staple in men’s fashion. Then, he spent a couple of years at Walmart, where he participated in the company’s Merchant Leadership Program. This experience proved valuable, but Graves’ lifelong enthusiasm for the outdoors — including everything from mountain and gravel biking to wakeboarding to canoeing — drove his decision to take beardedgoat to the next level. 

“Our vision was to create an outdoor brand that celebrates the lifestyle people have here in the Ozarks,” he explained. He cited the trails, roads and water ways available to outdoor enthusiasts in Northwest Arkansas. “We wanted to celebrate that lifestyle and build a brand around it.” 

The journey was not without its challenges. “Entry to market is tough,” Graves said. “Designing your own product and selling it is a tall order. There’s a lot of competition.” Other hurdles included struggles in acquiring digital customers and supply chain issues during the pandemic, both of which contributed to particularly egregious headaches, but Graves believes the brand’s specificity helped them persevere and allowed them to experience “exponential growth year after year since inception.”

“We established our brand positioning really specifically and uniquely against the market,” he explained. “Our products are specific enough that it creates differentiation against other brands in the market, but broad enough that anyone can wear them.”

Real-time feedback from aspiring entrepreneurs helped. Students in Anne Velliquette’s Integrated Marketing Communications class, an upper-level marketing class comprised of juniors and seniors, had an early front-row seat to the brand’s burgeoning success and even played a hand in it through semester-long collaborative projects. 

“What I love about this service-learning class is the client walks away with a ton of fantastic marketing ideas, many of which they can implement right away,” Velliquette explained. “It’s such an amazing opportunity for students. They get to see a real-world marketing opportunity.” Velliquette was excited about the collaboration because her son was already a fan of beardedgoat, and the company’s smaller size and proximity to campus meant students would get to see their ideas implemented quickly. Graves and Bell found one such idea, a brand ambassador program, especially appealing. 

“It was something that they really took and ran with right off the bat,” Velliquette remembers. “And so they were able to expand not just in this state or in the Northwest Arkansas region, but also to other universities.”

Graves said that they’re not done yet — he has big plans for the brand’s future. “I’d love to expand our physical presence to more brick-and-mortar stores across the country, and I’m going to continue to grow our online presence,” he said.

Owen Bell