Our Story
Basewear: (noun) the most comfortable technical underlayers for the outdoors that you can hike, climb, camp, swim, and lounge in.
We made our very first piece of Basewear in 2016. That sports bra changed everything — for us and our customers. We ditched the uncomfortable sports bras, swimsuits, underwear for technical underlayers that could go from sea to summit.
And now, we’re a cult favorite in the outdoor world. (And we’re still making those ultra-comfy sports bras.)
Hey, I’m BK!
I started the Tera Kaia Membership because I'm a true believer that anything you do to find true success has to be completely aligned with what you believe in and what you want to leave behind.
I realized pretty quickly that I didn't want to leave behind massive amounts of fashion waste, but the way that our economy and fashion industry work didn’t leave me much of a choice but to keep growing and growing, making more and more.
That’s because factories require minimums to be able to produce garments effectively and pay people fairly. That means if the quantities go down, the price per unit goes up.
So unless you want to pay well over $100 for a sports bra, we had to produce much more than we wanted to — creating tons of fabric, selling more and more, dumping more into marketing.
There are a lot of downsides to this type of hypercapitalism: it’s unsustainable, it makes it very difficult to create outlier sizing, it means chasing endless growth.
And in 2023, hypercapitalism nearly broke Tera Kaia completely.
Until we decided to change our model entirely.
That’s when the TK Membership was born.
How does the TK Membership Work?
Technical clothing you love, without the waste.
It was the start of a brand-new chapter. One where we could build community and keep offering Basewear to the folks who love it — but without all of the waste and landfill-bound excess that we hated. Our member-funded model means we only make just the right amount of Basewear - for the community that supports us the most.
After all, TK is a grassroots community effort at its heart.
The people in our community have kept us going all of these years. It was only natural that our next chapter centered them.
Meet Jen: She designs our Basewear and is the brain behind our unique sizing system.
Our models (aka best friends &community members!)
