This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Aug. 28, 2025.
It started with a pair of ripped ski pants.
During the pandemic, Kate Harvey and her family were living in Connecticut but, like many southern New Englanders, looked north to get outdoors during the isolation. She was skiing with her son in southern Vermont when her pants ripped on the lift. They were beyond mending, but she followed her son’s youthful interest in taking things apart to see how they work. After dissembling the pants, she used the parts to make small pouches.
“It was just little zip pouches that Teddy would put his money in, and he would bring them to school, and so then his buddies would be like, ‘Oh, those are so cool.’ And then their moms would ask about them,” Harvey said.
Fast forward a few years and Harvey’s budding BirdieBlue business is partnering with apparel makers like Burton in Burlington and Turtle Fur — located nearby in Morrisville — and others to turn worn out ski jackets and snow pants into boutique fanny packs and tote bags.
It was clear to Harvey that Vermont would be an ideal place to run such a business, with its proximity to skiing-adjacent and outdoors-focused business communities, and to the material she sought to repurpose. Her husband’s flexible job as head of sales for a medical technology company allowed the family to relocate.
“We decided it’s our happy place. It’s where we wanted to be,” Harvey said. “We were a little bit of the Covid cliche, I guess, but we found that this was just an incredibly supportive community. I almost think that if I hadn’t started this fully in Vermont, there’s no way this would have been successful.”
From a workshop crowded with bags of used cold-weather clothing in an industrial area on Old Creamery Road — along the Morrisville bypass — Harvey and assistant Allegra Sargent wash loads of worn-out jackets and pants before cutting them apart and reassembling them into fanny packs, tote bags and toiletry bags. These bags are sold directly to consumers through the BirdieBlue online retail shop, but they’ve also been proliferating in local retailers in Morrisville and Stowe, and even in places like REI stores in Williston and New Hampshire.
Harvey partnered with designers to first produce the fanny pack ($58), which was the shop’s flagship product, before moving onto the toiletry bag ($58) and totes ($110).
The fanny pack comes in three-panel colorways, and over time Harvey has gauged the popularity of certain color combinations.
Harvey started the business with the pitch that 92 million tons of textile waste is produced globally, and she presumed there would be a market for people who wanted to dispose of their clothing as ethically as possible.
“We started really with thinking, let’s create a program where just any skier — an individual mom who’s got a kid at an outdoor preschool that has totally unusable gear at the end of the season — we can just create a program where you can send us your gear for free, and then you get a discount code, or we can make something out of it for you,” Harvey said.
BirdieBlue will be relaunching the program soon in anticipation of a busy holiday season. The program was also how Harvey got connected with Burton.
“They kind of heard what I was doing, and they were a great case study in the fact that gear companies were looking for something to do with all this gear that was going in the garbage,” Harvey said. “We’re providing an opportunity to be a collaborator, not a competitor, where we’ll take the gear, we’ll create something.”
This has led to an expanded retail presence, but also partnerships with ski patrols at places like Stowe Mountain Resort and Bolton Valley Resort. Earlier this week, Sargent, who has a degree in production design with an emphasis in costuming and lives in Morrisville, was busy slicing up a Stratton Mountain Resort jacket set to be refashioned.
This two-women operation is how most of the work gets done. Harvey travels to events in Vermont and beyond to spread the gospel of her upcycled accessories, which are assembled by hand. In July, she received a $25,000 grant from a nonprofit funding women whose businesses address sustainability and the environment. She invested it in a used cutting machine to make the process more efficient.
BirdieBlue went from making a couple bags a week to hundreds of bags a month, scaling with the help of a domestic network of sewing factories. But like many U.S.-based manufacturers who do most of their manufacturing and source most of their materials in the country, it hasn’t been possible to insulate the business entirely from the vagaries of the global economy and the Trump administration’s tariffs, even while limiting the parts she sources from Asian countries.
“U.S. producers are like, ‘Well, wait a minute. China’s now charging this much more. We can match that now,’” Harvey said. “This whole idea of tariffs injecting money into the U.S. economy is total bulls**t, to be honest. Where we need more investment is grants and workforce development and education.”
At the end of the day, Harvey said her path to growth has been not just about how she makes her clothes, but how she tells the story of how and why she makes them that way.
“One thing that I’ve really realized is building the community drives the sales, because it is really about the story,” Harvey said. “I mean, we’re not mass producing. It truly takes time, like a lever is cutting every single jacket by hand, so I think once we get in front of people and they really understand what we’re doing, they buy into the story.”
