“The Unanticipated Journey”

- Casey Steidle

It’s a funny thing a new journey. You envision it. You anticipate it, and manifest the ideal outcomes of it. Yet, it never turns out just the way you imagined. Rapidly learned through world travels, I have carried this notion in my conscious; using it as a fundamental tool for the wildness that inevitably comes through life. Along with the anxious mysteries that parallel riding the ebb and flow of a journey comes personal evolvement, raw emotion, shattered expectations, awakened perspectives, and other unanticipated journeys. The true bliss of a journey lays within the hidden moments you did not anticipate, the ones that scare you the most and make you the utmost uncomfortable. By allowing yourself to break the mold of an anticipated journey is what ultimately unleashes the most groundbreaking of journeys. They arise with novel paths and ideas that did not appear on your map before.

My experience with BARE was a product of this curated sense of personal wanderlust. As Creative Director, Grason, said about the birth of BARE, “it was kind of a fluke.” Fresh out of college and after a bit of happy wandering and backpacking around the world, I felt hungry, if not starving, for my next adventure. Back in my home of Philadelphia I daydreamt of my next journey. Before I knew it, the City of Brotherly Love was in my rearview mirror. Two of my best friends, a cat, and myself piled into an over packed car and trekked west for Colorado. Of course, my envisioned journey in Colorado never played out the way my mind had predicted. Aside from snowboarding fresh powder with friends in the beautiful Rockies, it was saturated with stressful and scary moments. It was full of fallen through plans, jobs, and ideas. While it did not match the quintessential idea I had in my mind it did in fact play out more beneficial in the end.

 

After a few months of struggles, I stumbled across BARE. Immediately I was captivated by their innate passion, creativity, and innovation. While I was unsure what I wanted as a long term career, I knew I wanted to be engulfed in their mindset and was a sponge from the moment I stepped into the creative studio as an intern. The BARE team is made up of a dynamic crew that makes the wheels of creativity behind this brand turn with utter finesse. They treat you as family, empower you to be a creative thinker, and embrace imperfection and uniqueness.

 

“By allowing yourself to break the mold of an anticipated journey is what ultimately unleashes the most groundbreaking of journeys”

Every day that I was in the studio I saw them pushing the limits of their brand, and observed how they ran their business with passion, class, and wits. It was the environment that I craved, and the environment that was going to allow me to break beyond my own thresholds. I soaked in ideas in the ambiance of brilliantly creative people and from that drew great inner inspiration. Being in their presence opened up ideas for journeys that I had never considered tapping into.

That’s why BARE is so unique, it is more than just a creative brand. As people, they believe in pushing others to break the mold, do something unexpected, and to be passionate towards the adventures of life. You can see this and feel this with BARE, because it shines through their collections as well as their personalities. Coming out to Colorado I felt fresh and hopeful for something new that would challenge me.

BARE fulfilled just that for me. They not only were apart of my unanticipated journey but also represent the beauty that is woven into an unanticipated journey. It was an unanticipated, unexpected journey that sparked ideas and opportunities, and ultimately inspired me to challenge myself at new levels. I am now venturing out to California with confidence after my experience with BARE to tackle the next journey at the Laguna College of Art and Design in a program for Graphic Design in Action Sports.

Something that was never on my radar but now is the next endeavor. It was an opportunity that was hidden by my naïve, envisioned journey. My time working with BARE uncovered this pathway for me, and I look forward to embracing the vast opportunities ahead. The unanticipated journey… what a fantastic thing it is.