The First Hide
A story about waste, luxury, land stewardship, and building new markets for regenerative agriculture.
It Started With One Hide
In January of 2018, I stood over the hide of one of our own steers and covered it in salt.
I did not know that the hide in front of me would become a marker I would carry for years. At the time, I was simply trying to make sense of a problem that felt both practical and philosophical, how could we talk about regenerative agriculture while accepting that so much of the animal was still treated as waste?
The hide sat for months.I never finished it.
For a long time, that bothered me. It felt like evidence of something incomplete in me, another unfinished farm project, another good intention interrupted by the daily realities of livestock, land, weather, cash flow, overcommitment, exhaustion, and the endless work of keeping a farm moving.
I came to understand that the unfinished hide was telling me something else.
This was not a small problem, and it was not something I could solve alone, one hide at a time. It was a systems problem.
If roughly a third of every carcass is treated as waste or low-value byproduct, then the regenerative meat sector is still carrying a major contradiction. We can raise animals in ways that improve soil, support biodiversity, build rural economies, and produce nutrient-dense food, and still lose value at the moment the animal leaves the farm.
That loss is not only economic. It is cultural. It is ecological. It is moral. It reveals what our current markets know how to see, and what they do not.
This month, Range Revolution will transport 1,000 hides aggregated from a collective of ranches in the Pacific Northwest. Even writing that number feels unbelievable!
When I began working on this company, our first leather was assembled in the least efficient way imaginable. Hides moved across the country in fragmented, expensive, and often absurd ways. Our first purchase was ~75 hides, and at the time, that felt enormous.
Now we are preparing to move a full truckload of 1,000 hides from regenerative ranchers and landscapes in the Pacific Northwest.
The scale matters because this problem cannot be by a beautiful one-off product or a compelling story alone. It requires infrastructure and economies of scale. It requires aggregation, transportation, processing relationships, traceability, certification pathways, design, sales, capital, and the stubborn willingness to keep building. Man, if I could only convey the amount of grit it has required.
What has changed over the past several years is that Range Revolution is no longer simply proving that regenerative leather can exist. We are proving that it can compete. Our aggregation, transportation, and processing model has matured to the point where our landed leather costs are now on par with, and in some cases better than, globally sourced hides with no traceability, no regenerative sourcing, and no meaningful relationship to land stewardship.
That is the part I matured into realizing. Yes, story matters.
But the economics have to work, too.
As a first-generation farm owner, I know what it feels like when the economics do not work.
I know the pressure of thin margins. I know what it is to build a direct-to-consumer meat business, to believe deeply in the quality of what you are producing, and to still feel the gap between what the work costs and what the market is willing to recognize.
I know the frustration of stewarding land in ways that create real ecological value, while operating inside markets that often fail to compensate that value. And I know the cost of waste.
That lived experience is still at the center of Range Revolution.
We are not only trying to build a leather company. We are trying to build value-added market infrastructure for regenerative agriculture, infrastructure that helps ranchers capture more value from the animals they raise and the ecological stewardship they are already practicing.
This year, we are beginning work that once felt far off, supporting grass-fed and grass-finished holistic graziers as they transition into ecological monitoring and regenerative certification programs.
That has always been one of the north stars. To support and incentivize transition to more regenerative practices, and for those already practicing but not yet monitoring their outcomes, to be a part of the support system to get them into an ecological monitoring program. It’s amazing that this year we get to do this work!
As a designer and brand builder, I also believe luxury has to be redefined from the material up.
True luxury does not begin with a logo. It begins with origin. It begins with the land, the animal, the producer, the processing, the hands, the choices, and the values embedded in a material before it ever becomes a finished object. Materials carry a spirit of place. Genius Loci!
There is a lot happening at Range Revolution right now, new contracts in the pipeline, new partners, new capital, new operational leadership, and our first regenerative ranch retreat for investors this fall.
But underneath all of that, I still think about the first hide.
The one I salted by hand.
The one I never finished.
The one that showed me the problem was bigger than I understood.
This work has not been easy, but it’s be very worthwhile.
From one unfinished hide to a regenerative leather supply chain built for scale, Range Revolution is entering a new chapter. And in many ways, the original question remains the same:
What would become possible if we stopped treating waste as inevitable, and started building markets around the full value of what regenerative agriculture already gives us?
Any entrepreneur will tell you, it’s not just you and your team to take the leap. Our partners, kids, family and closes friends around us are directly or indirectly on this ride alongside us. I added that photo of Chris and I with locked hands because ultimately, through all the biggest hurdles, we have faced them together.
From the windy plains,
Cate