Sara Lawhead has spent her career building things. Teams, products, brands, strategies. She has worked inside large public companies, navigated private equity environments, and managed multiple brands simultaneously at a pace that left little room to think. Now she is doing something different. She is leading Thacker NYC, a founder-led brand going after a consumer the outdoor industry has largely ignored.
“We think of life as a sport. No one is really talking to the everyday person. Whether you are 22, 45, or 65, we are all very active as a society. Coming out of COVID, health is at the forefront. And the outdoor industry has historically shied away from that consumer. We tend to go after the core, the hardcore, the top of the mountain. But it is the everyday people that still want to get outside, still want to look the part, still want to look good doing it. Whether that is a hike on the weekend, a kid’s soccer practice, or catching sushi in New York City with your girlfriend. That is a big, unmet opportunity.”
That shift, from managing six brands and developing over fifty products a year to building one brand with intention and patience, is the backdrop for this conversation.
I spend time early on with Sara talking about what the outdoor market actually looks like right now, from the ground level. Sara walked several trade shows in quick succession: Switchback, GOA, TRE, and Surf Expo. Each one told a different story. The running market is loud and confident, with newer brands challenging the legacy players and drawing real energy from specialty retailers. Other categories feel quieter. Sara talks about how reading those rooms, understanding where the excitement is and where people are holding back, shapes how Thacker is thinking about where to place its focus.
We then move into tariffs and supply chain, a topic that touched every brand in the industry in recent years. Sara is candid about how those conversations went inside large organizations, the price pressures, the uncertainty, the tough retailer meetings. What gave some brands an advantage was not reacting faster, it was having already started to diversify manufacturing before the pressure hit. Thacker was in that position, which removed some of the chaos that others were managing in real time.
One of the more interesting threads we pull on is what Sara calls pattern recognition in categories. She traces the arc of the surf industry, watching legacy brands get acquired, consolidated under private equity, and slowly hollowed out.
“Once that special sauce, once the founder, once that DNA has really left the business, it gets harder and harder as new leadership comes in, as new ideas come in, to continue that passion and that excitement. The brand doesn’t die, but the DNA isn’t there anymore. It gets sucked out.”
She connects that directly to why founder-led environments feel different to her right now, and why conviction at the top of a brand is not a soft quality. It is a commercial one.
Sara has a clear point of view on where brands lose the thread. It usually starts with listening too closely to what retailers want and not closely enough to what the brand actually is.
“You get excited. You hear from retailers, hey, if you did this, this, and this, that would be great. And you are then serving more of the retailer than staying true to the brand. You grow and grow and grow, and you get further away from where you truly are. You start muddying your messaging, you start muddying what you stand for.”
She tells a specific story from her time at Wilson Sporting Goods, where a retailer pushed for a lower price point product. The answer was not yes, and it was not a flat no either. It was a conversation about how to meet the opportunity without putting Wilson’s name on something that did not belong there. That kind of navigation, staying true to the brand while finding a real solution, is something she returns to more than once.
We also get into innovation, and Sara does not use the word the way most people in the industry do. To her, innovation is not always a new product no one has ever seen. Sometimes it is a new colorway that speaks to a consumer who was previously invisible in the category. She tells the story of bringing leopard print, purple, and fuchsia to a line of camping chairs at GCI, after a retailer pointed out that the mothers on the sidelines were not seeing themselves in the product. It sold. And it changed how that team thought about who they were actually designing for.
“That is innovation. Understanding who else is out there and how do we continue to talk to them to grow our market share.”
Leadership comes up throughout our conversation, though not in an abstract way. Sara talks about the BIRDS communication framework, a tool she uses with every team she joins to understand how different people receive information. She is an eagle, direct and brief, and she has learned that not everyone on her team is.
“As a leader, you have to have the awareness of who you are talking to and how they receive information. The more you understand who you are talking to and how they operate, the better the conversation, the project, the process, the business will go. But here is the thing. Once you know it, you actually have to do it. That is the second battle.”
We close on two things Sara would tell someone early in their career. The first is relationships, which is not a new piece of advice, but the way she frames it is specific. She still hears from her college coach. She connected with people two or three roles before we ever actually met. Relationships do not just open doors, they move faster than most people expect. The second carries more weight than it might first appear.
“Figure out what you are good at. Not what you want to do, not what you think is cool, not what everybody else is telling you to do. Figure out what you are good at and chase that. It is so important that you internalize what you are good at and what you like to do. That will help you in your career and ultimately in what you want to do long term.”
It is a conversation about building something real, reading the market honestly, and knowing when to move and when to wait.