The first time we shot trap, the better score between us was eight clays out of twenty‑five. We drove home feeling like champions anyway, which tells you something about this sport that no scorecard ever will.

We came to it foreign to everything. Foreign to guns, to the etiquette, to the vocabulary. What hooked us was not the bang. It was the quiet right before it, the strange old arrangement where you are the one who calls the target into the air and you are the one who decides the exact moment to meet it. There is something primitive living in that second of silence. Nothing else in the week asks it of us.

That first afternoon was a cold one, early spring, on the edge of Miami, out where the city gives up and the Everglades take over. We showed up knowing nobody and were treated, from the first moment, like members of a fmily or a club. We drove home planning the next weekend. We have since learned this is the universal symptom.

Then we went looking for something to wear, and found tactical nylon, camouflage, and hardware off a movie prop. Twenty million Americans broke a clay target last year, many of them drawn by the beauty and uniqueness of the sport, and the market dresses them for a different thing entirely. People who will spend more on an beautiful shotgun than on their car get handed clothes with no intention behind them at all. We design beautiful things for a living, so in the begining we found all of this a bit curious. Then it started to bother us.

Claybore is what we did about it. Two founders and a small company making clothing and goods for the culture of breaking clays, from Southern Florida, where the light has a way of convincing you that staying indoors is a moral failing. Everything we make gets more care than we plan on talking about.

We host shoots, tell stories, and make things worth keeping. If you have read this far, you probably already know the feeling.

Pull.