“I stumbled into a way to solve some of the funding problems from the very beginning,” Missy Park, founder of Title Nine, told me on a walk from their headquarters. The problem she’s referring to is the funding disparity that women founders in the outdoor industry have often faced and worked their way through since before her founding of Title Nine in 1989.
Since then, Title Nine has grown into one of the largest women-focused outdoor retailers in the country, and Park has spent decades helping build a market for outdoor and athletic products designed around women’s needs.
I came to Emeryville, Calif., for Title Nine’s ninth annual Pitchfest Outdoor Edition, where 11 women founders from nine brands pitched their outdoor businesses and products to a panel of judges for a chance to win a purchase order in the 2027 Title Nine catalog.
Park continued, “And that was starting out as a retailer. I didn’t have any money. I could not have started a brand if I wanted to.”
Turning an Idea Into a Business
In some ways, we have made major strides forward in the 37 years since Park founded Title Nine. The women competing in her 9th annual Pitchfest Outdoor Edition this September prove that. They’ve innovated products around problems they and other women have experienced, addressing specific gaps in the outdoor market, but turning an idea into a sustainable business still requires money.
A 2025 report from Founded Outdoors, which surveyed 82 outdoor recreation businesses, found that financing and fundraising were the second-most–cited business challenge among respondents. In 2024, only 15% of women-only founding teams reported raising equity, compared with 50% of men-only teams. Among those that did raise equity, the median amount was $26,000 for women-only teams and $100,000 for men-only teams.
“I think that lack of education surrounding my financial options when it comes to small business and business operation as a whole played significantly into the challenges of my startup,” said Cara Goodenough, founder of Wildfolde and Pitchfest finalist. “The initial exposure was lacking from the beginning because ‘little girls don’t need to hear about finances’ — which is total BS,” she said.
Beyond Goodenough’s lived experience, the Founded Outdoors report also revealed that women founders reported lower familiarity with every financial tool included in the survey. For other founders, the challenge can be knowing what to ask, when to ask it, and having the confidence to say it out loud, but even more so, it is getting someone else to believe in the problem they’re trying to solve.
Unique Selling Propositions
Sandra Šuc, founder of Alpine Nation and Pitchfest finalist, said one of the hardest parts of seeking outside funding has been explaining the brand’s unique selling proposition to potential investors, usually men, who don’t recognize the gap she is trying to fill. “You’re potentially pitching to a group of men that don’t really see it as anything special,” she said. “They just see it as ‘well, you’re making women’s clothing, so what?’”
That disconnect can matter before a founder ever gets to the question of how much money she needs to get the business off the ground. Sarah Berkeley, founder of Symbiosis Gear and Pitchfest finalist, experienced a different version of Šuc’s problem when her bank initially gave her only a $3,000 credit card and no line of credit.
“As a woman who grew up low-income to get to that level, it was like, ‘I kind of made it,’” she said. “And to have someone say to me that they’re not giving me any money — literally zero — was very demoralizing.”
Yet, Berkeley found that some of the people closest to the actual problem can be much more receptive. Her wholesale customers, she said, are largely men, but they see women come into their retail stores and encounter the same problems her company is trying to solve, and they see the value in keeping her packs on their store shelves, serving half their customer base a product that better fits their needs.
Title Nine Roots
Park’s experience building Title Nine back in 1989 wasn’t all that different from the women participating in her Pitchfest today. When she launched the company, she didn’t have the money to start a new outdoor brand, so she started as a retailer. She came up with a creative solution: building supplier relationships to access inventory without paying upfront.
“I said, ‘We are going to be curators and editors,’” Park recalled. “All of these people were flooding into the women’s [outdoor] market, and their stuff is kind of BS, so we are going to go to find the best of the best amongst these products that are being made from Nike or Adidas or The North Face and the ones that really work for women.”
Once she found the products that worked the best for women, she still had to find a workaround. “The guys wouldn’t part with their money, but they would give you product and let you pay for it in 180 days,” Park said. “And that’s a bank.”
That creativity is particularly important for consumer-product companies, where founders often must invest substantial amounts in inventory before they can even make a sale. Alisha Stephens, founder of Umanos and one of Pitchfest’s winners, invested some of her own savings into her initial launch and then sought out community resources, mentors, and a lender who helped her secure a manufacturing line of credit.
“There are all these misconceptions that, in order to make it work, you have to have VC funding, or you have to go fundraise, or you have to sell a large part of your company in the beginning to really give you that leg up,” Stephens said.
Multiple Paths to Financing
In a panel on financing outdoor businesses at Pitchfest, Missy Park, Oiselle founder Sally Bergesen, and Carve Designs co-founder Thayer Sylvester described very different approaches to financing their companies and the tradeoffs that came with each, further illustrating the creative paths women often take to stay in business.
Park still owns 100% of Title Nine, a structure that has given her complete control but also required her to accept slower growth. Sylvester, on the other hand, eventually brought in private equity to accelerate Carve Designs’ growth. She later sold the company to a larger conglomerate and no longer owns a stake, but said the additional financial resources have made it easier to manage cash flow, payroll, and inventory.
Bergesen also started Oiselle, owning the company outright before raising $2 million and giving up a portion of her equity. Along the way, she said, she learned that financial control and decision-making control don’t necessarily have to be the same thing.
Creative Financing
For founders trying to figure out how to finance a consumer product company, those distinctions matter because capital can help a business grow faster, but the source of that capital and what a founder gives up in exchange for it can fundamentally change how a company operates.
“You can’t grow a business without understanding very deeply how the finance part of it works,” Sylvester told the panel.
When Park was building Title Nine, supplier relationships allowed her to obtain inventory and pay later, effectively giving her access to financing without a traditional loan or an investor. “When I think about financing, we have to get creative,” Park said. “Our suppliers, many of the outdoor brands, they are our bank.”
That kind of financial knowledge can be as important as access to capital itself. The Founded Outdoors report found that more than 35% of respondents overall were unfamiliar with several forms of alternative financing, including inventory financing, purchase-order financing, and supplier financing.
Barriers to Financing
The problem, then, is whether founders know what kinds of capital are available. At Pitchfest, founders described using savings, credit, lines of credit, supplier relationships, wholesale orders, community resources, and mentors to grow their businesses.
“The more money and resources we can invest in, the more it affects our timeline,” said Carly Lietzke, co-founder of Girlhood and Pitchfest finalist. “We might have to go slower or do things one at a time because we’re waiting for cash flow to come in or an order.”
She also described another barrier that is harder to put on a balance sheet: being taken seriously when asking financial questions. “I think there is a barrier to taking [women] seriously in business, and then it comes to finances, and that’s a whole other barrier,” she said.
Opportunities Exist
That doesn’t mean that every financial challenge these founders face can be attributed to gender. Some are the realities of building a capital-intensive consumer business in the outdoor industry. Still, when broader industry data shows women founders raising less equity, using fewer financial tools, and reporting less familiarity with those tools, gender is a part of the equation we should not ignore. But that doesn’t mean that women founders are left to figure it all out on their own.
“I do feel like with companies like Title Nine, we’ve been able to access some funds, and support, help, mentorship, and guidance, which has been largely helpful, and really tapping into that community has been even more helpful,” remarked founder of FEND helmets and Pitchfest finalist Sejune Kong. “Although this is difficult, I do see pockets and areas where there are opportunities for us.”
