The Best Hunting Gear I Own Was Designed in Muskegon
Michigan has been running the outdoor industry for 150 years, and TUO is the next chapter
Muskegon — In September of 2023, I found myself in northern British Columbia, bumping along on a bush plane through the Canadian Rockies. My pilot and I were headed to a remote lake a hundred miles from the nearest road. There, I’d board a johnboat that I’d take up river a dozen more miles to chase moose. It was some of the most rugged and beautiful country I’d ever seen.
Our hunt started warm. Then the temps dropped, the wind picked up, and the rain moved in. It was a wild mix of weather for our adventure, but I was dry and warm through all of it. I was wearing TUO Gear, a brand of high-end hunting apparel designed in Muskegon.
Not Bozeman. Not the Bitterroots. Muskegon.
If that seems like an unlikely place to design clothing for the Canadian Rockies, it shouldn’t. Michigan has been outfitting outdoor adventures in our big and wild country for a century and a half. TUO is just the latest chapter.
Look back to 1898 in Dowagiac. There and then a beekeeper named James Heddon whittled the end of a pinewood broomstick into a frog and tossed it into a small pond. A bass nailed it, and Heddon fishing lures was born.
Of course, Heddon didn’t invent the artificial lure, (check out The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton for a great look back on the history), but he did create the first commercially successful wooden plug. That little town in Cass County became a center of American tackle.
Around that same time, over in Kalamazoo, another man named William Shakespeare Jr. (his real name) patented the level-wind reel and ran the famous Shakespeare brand there for decades.
It gets better. In 1933, Fred Bear, the unofficial patron saint of modern bowhunting, started a company in Detroit doing silkscreen work for the auto industry. He fell in love with the bow and arrow and spent most of the 1930s pushing Michigan and Wisconsin to establish bow seasons for the first time.
Eventually, he moved his entire operation to Grayling. It was there that he designed the glass-laminated bow, the Razorhead broadhead, and the take-down recurve. Fred went down in outdoor history and even inspired one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
There are tons of other examples too. Eppinger has been stamping Dardevle spoons in Dearborn since 1906. Scientific Anglers has been building fly lines out of Midland since 1945. Carhartt started in Detroit in 1889. Wolverine Worldwide (think Merrell, Chaco and Saucony) has been based in Rockford since 1883. Stormy Kromer Hats, those plaid camps with the ear flaps that are a staple of the outdoors, hail from the U.P.
None of this should be a surprise, though. Michigan is and has been a manufacturing giant that also happens to sit on 4.6 million acres of public land, most of which is open to hunting. Plus, we’ve got some of the best fishing lakes, rivers, and streams in the entire country. Engineers and outdoorsmen all in the same place is rare, and it means the people drawing up the gear are the people using it.
Which brings me back to Muskegon.
TUO is one of five brands under Nexus Outdoors, in an unassuming building on the east side of Muskegon. Inside, it’s packed wall to wall with hunting apparel. Seriously, I’ve been in malls with less clothing.
ScentLok, Blocker Outdoors, Hardcore Waterfowl, Whitewater, and Tuo all under one roof. Most people have probably driven past it without a second look.
The oldest brand in Nexus’ lineup is ScentLok, which an engineer named Greg Sesselmann started here in 1992. It’s a company built on the idea that activated carbon could be infused into the fabric of clothing to mask a hunter’s scent long enough to get a shot. Greg invented an entire product category from a desk in West Michigan.
Recently, I drove out to Muskegon to see TUO’s new 2026 line and ended up spending most of the visit talking about fabric. Anyone can put a hood on a jacket. It’s the fabric and fit that make the real difference.
Steve Allie, head of marketing for Nexus, and president Aaron Ambur will talk about this stuff for hours. And on this occasion we did. It makes a difference too. I’ve used TUO for years, in some pretty extreme places.
There’s a thread running through all of this. Heddon whittled his plug at a pond he fished himself. Fred Bear was killing Michigan whitetails with his own broadheads before he ever sold one. The guys in that Muskegon building are hunters who design, not designers who hunt. That order matters.
Soon I’ll be headed up above the Arctic Circle to chase caribou and muskox in Greenland. That’s about as far from a Muskegon industrial park that a person can get.
I’m taking TUO with me.
