Hunter Harlow and the map inside the hat

The map was inside the hat. An early Sendero design put Big Bend topography beneath the bill, a small surprise for anyone curious enough to turn it over. It was an apt beginning for a business shaped by geologists. Even its headwear had something to say about the ground.

Hunter Harlow’s route into apparel followed the same sort of concealed connection. The degree said geology. The eventual job involved hats, shirts, customers, staff, and enough moving parts to occupy a roomful of people. Between the two lay the Southwest, where work and fascination had become difficult to separate.

Today he is the co-founder and CEO of Sendero Provisions Co., based in Waco, Texas. The company has international distribution and a wardrobe that extends well beyond its first caps. Harlow’s biography gives that expansion a human scale: a friendship formed at university, a business learned along the way, and a town he had reasons to keep.

A souvenir with field experience

Harlow and Aaron Bryant met as geology undergraduates at Baylor. Their work later carried them into the Four Corners landscape. Bryant went there for geology work; Harlow’s doctoral research took him into rural Arizona and Utah. Both were spending more time working and less time enjoying the outdoors they loved.

That is a familiar bargain for anyone who makes a profession out of an interest. The landscape becomes a workplace. A river becomes something you pass on the way to a deadline. Sendero offered them another connection to those places. In his early account, Harlow described Bryant starting the company before inviting him aboard.

There was a visual vocabulary ready to hand: desert colors, national parks, rivers, and the things people wore while moving through them. A hat was a manageable place to begin. The topographic detail made the connection specific. You could carry a little of Big Bend without needing to bring home a rock.

The academic path had been substantial. Harlow graduated from Baylor in 2010, completed a geology master’s at the University of Kansas in 2013, and returned to Waco for doctoral study. His wife, Rachel, returned with him. A career change would eventually alter the work, while allowing the place they had chosen to remain.

Learning the business, one box at a time

A growing hat company creates tasks less scenic than its inspiration. Products need to arrive, orders need to leave, and someone has to make the numbers make sense. Sendero’s early operation included packing hundreds of boxes during lunch breaks. By 2023 it had about 20 full-time employees and its own warehousing, fulfillment, and distribution.

The geography had widened too. Harlow described stores carrying Sendero in France, Britain, Germany, Spain, and Japan. An in-house fashion team gave the company more ways to answer a question that remains pleasingly domestic: What else do we want in our closets? Even an international business needs something to wear tomorrow.

His scientific education offered a way to approach unfamiliar work. Critical thinking, pattern recognition, and learning independently could travel into sourcing, production, wholesale, and e-commerce. Each area brought different problems. Bringing them together resembled the intellectual work he already knew, with a product at the end that someone could put on.

There were less comfortable lessons. A split with his original business partner in 2018 forced Harlow to reckon with the agreements they had failed to make early. He bought out the partner shortly before Black Friday. The story is a useful interruption to the cheerful imagery: a business can be growing while its foundations still need attention.

He learned digital marketing himself, and he also learned to bring in expertise. Finance, logistics, and design require more than a founder’s enthusiasm. I thrive in organized chaos, he has said. The important word is organized. A customer may enjoy a joke on a shirt; getting the right shirt into the right box calls for a different temperament.

His ambition includes a place for Sendero in the conversation about independent apparel. That makes the daily work consequential. A memorable design gets someone’s attention. A company’s systems determine whether the experience remains worth repeating.

A cowboy hat with a sense of humor

Sendero’s cap bearing the words Cowboy Hat has a joke built into its construction. The lettering announces something the shape cheerfully disputes. It gives the wearer an easy way into Western style, including a little permission to laugh at the costume.

Harlow has been direct about that openness. The brand welcomes people whose lives involve different kinds of work and recreation. By 2023, its retail relationships included Free People, Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Madewell, Cavender’s, and Atwoods. That range suggests how many wardrobes can accommodate the same wink.

The voice takes effort. In March 2025, Harlow welcomed Lawton Cook as lead copywriter. Cook had already appeared in a Sendero photoshoot in Fredericksburg in 2021, before working in the outdoor industry in Austin. His return put an old collaborator into a new role, this time helping shape the sentences around the clothes.

Other projects make the team’s involvement visible. Sendero’s media crew built a mock conspiracy set for Free Hat Day, complete with files and newspaper clippings. The company also partnered with racing driver Brad Perez, with Will Suarez designing the car’s look for an Xfinity race in Mexico City. The humor travels into places where a hat would hardly be large enough.

Harlow’s own public enthusiasm often lands on those collaborators. That habit helps explain the company’s internal mission: love people, have fun, work hard, in that order. The sequence is a choice about how a working day should feel. It also sets a demanding standard for a business whose customers encounter its personality before its operations.

“love people, have fun, work hard”

Sendero’s internal mission, shared by Hunter Harlow

The town he chose to keep

Waco appears in Harlow’s story as a network of people. He has spoken about friendships with local restaurateurs, brewers, coffee shops, and other business owners. Those relationships helped give Sendero a reason to stay and a reason to act when neighbors needed support.

For Together for Texas, he helped organize a livestream concert with musicians including Houndmouth and Phillip Phillips. Merchandise sales supported businesses, nonprofits, and artists. He recalled raising just over $50,000 before deductions and sending 42 checks of $700 around the state. Local shirt production gave another Waco business work in the process.

The sums deserve their separate places in the story. Gross money raised and checks distributed describe different parts of a fundraiser. What connects them is the practical route from an audience to people Harlow knew were trying to keep their own work going.

In 2024, Sendero opened its first storefront in downtown Waco. Harlow described the opening with affection for his crew and the place, and invited people to stop by. A shop gives an online brand a physical room. Customers can walk in, handle a garment, and encounter the business in the city whose name accompanies it.

The family connection matters too. Harlow has described sharing the experience of running Sendero with his children, including travel together. His account of entrepreneurship includes the competing demands of a spouse, children, and a business. The pleasures of ownership come with several calendars, each quite convinced it deserves priority.

His public roles now extend beyond the company. Startup Waco lists him on its board of directors. In July 2026, the Greater Waco Chamber named him a Waco Under 40 honoree, with the celebration scheduled for October 27. The recognition places him among local leaders across several occupations, a fitting setting for someone whose own occupation took an unexpected turn.

The trail reaches Tuscany

Another 2026 development carried Sendero into Italian basketball. The company became title sponsor of Mens Sana Basketball for the 2026-27 season. Harlow discussed the pleasure of seeing a Waco brand on a Siena team’s jersey, while acknowledging the club’s identity and the generations of people who had sustained it.

He had yet to visit Siena when he spoke about the partnership in August. His intentions included spending time with the team and supporters, developing products together, and introducing the two communities to each other. The next chapter therefore involves listening as well as putting a name on a shirt.

Back in Central Texas, his outdoor interests remain close. There are local rivers to fish and a vegetable garden with peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, and okra. He talks about gardening with the same affection that once drew him into desert fieldwork. Attention to a place still supplies a good deal of his pleasure.

Sendero is Spanish for path or trail. Harlow has followed one into a business he did not originally expect to run. The early hat offers a compact reminder of how that happened: a useful object, an extra detail, and a landscape carried along wherever its owner happens to go.