It's Friday, the end of the traditional workweek — if such a thing still exists. For many business owners, the weekend can be even busier than the Monday through Friday schedule. We're starting a new series today called Bricks, Mortar and Beyond, focusing on what it takes to operate a business in 2026. We're starting in North Bentonville with a clothing company that began with a Kickstarter campaign and a pledge to make clothes that deserve to exist.
It's fitting that the flagship store for LIVSN is a two-minute walk from Little Sugar Creek that flows between Bentonville and Bella Vista.
"So you're in the store and you walk right in here. It's high ceilings, it's open air. You see our product displayed somewhat by activity in here. So we can kind of tell stories — if you're going to go float the creek, we'll take you to our creek line."
LIVSN founder and CEO Andrew Gibbs-Dabney says the company's goals include not harming the planet or people, contributing to community, treating employees well and creating clothing in harmony with the outdoors.
"But then you take two steps down here into our headquarters. And so this is where we do all the design, all of our operations."
He's an Arkansas native who grew up in Fort Smith and Fayetteville.
“Exploring the Ozarks and the hills and hollows and valleys and rivers and creeks of this area informs the products we make today, he says. So the Ozarks have four seasons. We have 100-degree summers and zero-degree winters. We don't have big mountains to ski on. As you see, we don't make insulated ski wear, but we do have to have a diverse set of clothing, or at least a versatile set of clothing, that allows us to recreate and be outside in all four of those seasons. And I think that gives us kind of a unique edge from a design perspective — we don't live in Southern California, we don't have to only make stuff to go surfing or on your weekend trip to Tahoe."
Gibbs-Dabney is standing in the middle of the LIVSN store, surrounded by racks of outdoor pants, shorts, overalls and shirts. LIVSN clothes are sold around the country and around the world from the company's online presence, but they're rooted in the Ozarks. Gibbs-Dabney says the brand developed in his house in Fayetteville about eight years ago with a Kickstarter effort. The first office was a 100-square-foot room in Fayetteville, and then the company continued to evolve.
"Moved up to a place in Bentonville just opportunistically, and we found a building that needed occupancy, and it was a great deal. So we were there for a few years. And then moving into this place has been a big moment for us because it's bigger, it's more spacious. We've got natural light. We're across from the creek and the bike path and we're in a spot we feel like we can call home and build from for several years."
Gibbs-Dabney says before LIVSN he spent five years with the apparel company Fayettechill. He says when his time there was over, he didn't know as much as he thought he should, but he knew he wanted to be in the outdoor industry. He liked the people, the environment, business practices and values that are connected to outdoors-minded enthusiasts. And he possessed a deep interest in outdoor clothing.
"Just enough knowledge to be dangerous on how to build a company. I talk to people that are coming up through starting their own business about this inflection point between knowledge and ignorance. You have to have just enough knowledge to feel confident enough to do it, but not too much to where you know that it's going to be too hard. And I was right there, and had a lot of thoughts about what it meant to build a responsible business, what it meant to build a product that deserved to exist in the world — not on the merit of its brand, but on its function — and thoughts about what it would mean to be a meaningful business locally and internationally and nationally, all those things. So LIVSN was really an excuse or an opportunity to put all of this theory — so much that's been in my head — into practice, into one business, and try to do it right from the start."
Kyle Kellams: So there's the knowledge, there's the ignorance intersection, but there's also a lot of pressure in saying something that hadn't been done before — clothing that deserves to exist. That's setting yourself up for patience, frustration, or a little bit of both.
Gibbs-Dabney: That checks out. I think it should be a little bit hard to bring something new into the world. Not an idea, but a physical product. And I don't think the bar is actually as high as it might sound. When it comes to building clothing or anything physical you're creating, you're taking resources to make something new in a world that has so much stuff. I think there should be somewhat of a bar — either have a point of view, have a mission, or ideally that product has some purpose that's not being met, some need out there for a customer that's not being met by what's currently on the market. And that could even be style, right? Like it's clothing. People wear this stuff to represent who they are on the outside. And I think that the bar could be that your style is a point of view that helps people express themselves in some way. What I was really trying to avoid was building things that are already built and using a brand to sell more things to make myself money.
Last year, LIVSN became a certified B Corp — that's a for-profit company verified by the global nonprofit B Lab to meet standards for social and environmental performance. Gibbs-Dabney says meeting those goals helped him connect with his customers, and connecting with the LIVSN clientele is important for him and for the longevity of the business, he says. This Bentonville store's open floor plan with no wall between retail and office is intentional.
"And that gives us this really cool connection between what we think we're doing and the way people actually receive what we're doing. And it's funny, we can hear conversations in the store sitting down here and it's either amusing or validating or somewhere in between."
Gibbs-Dabney says in 2026, when both clients and competition can be anywhere in the world, LIVSN is interested in keeping a connection with customers for as long as possible. He says that starts with making apparel that will last a long time and then last even longer. In the heart of the store is a repair counter.
"So this is something that's really near and dear to us. This idea of building something that deserves to exist is only valid if you can help that product exist for longer. And we tend to think that our responsibility as a manufacturer, as a designer for a product that brought it here, extends all the way to the end of life. And we want to share that responsibility with our customer, too. And repairs is a good way to do that. So we offer a lifetime repair program for all of our products. It's either warranty — so if it broke and it shouldn't, we fix it for free. If it broke just because you wore it for years and years and years, that's what apparel does — we'll still fix that at cost. And this counter is where we kind of manage that in the store. And every month we have a repair pop up where we bring in the person who does our repairs, who's based down in Fayetteville, and anybody can bring anything in here and get it repaired and give that product a new lease on life."
Kellams: Is there a favorite item in here that maybe if we come in, we don't see or notice — be it product, be it tool?
"Let me show you something. It may not be exactly what you're asking, but let me show you this pair of pants hanging on the wall. A mentor, someone locally who is very involved in the startup community and was the first person to ever believe and listen outside of my family and write a small check and said, hey, I believe you can get this done. This is his first pair of pants. And so he wore these an estimated over a thousand times. He wore them essentially every single day. And I saw him all the time — he was just nonstop wearing them. And when they started to wear thin, we brought him back and we armored him. It's hard to describe, but it's got extra layers of fabric on it with kind of cool contrast orange stitching on there, some blue stitching over here, and really leaned into this idea of visible mending, celebration of repair. And he wore them another several hundred times until he eventually just — his size changed and he got smaller than they are. And so now they're up here as kind of an homage that says, look, this pair of pants has done what we intend. Honestly, if he didn't just grow out of them — if they don't fit anymore — he'd still be wearing them. And I think this is what we want more of. We want more of these stories of someone having a product and repairing it and wearing it and having it and wearing it and repairing it and living their life. And the product tells that story."
Andrew Gibbs-Dabney is the founder and CEO of the clothing company LIVSN — spelled L-I-V-S-N. Our conversation took place at the company's flagship retail spot in North Bentonville. LIVSN is a company with both in-person and online retail presence.
Our next business for our Bricks, Mortar and Beyond series started as a fixed location, then became mobile.
"The pandemic had a lot to do with that. We were in a brick and mortar style location, but I'd always wanted to be mobile, and I actually had the trailer purchased for going mobile before the pandemic happened. But whenever everything shut down and overhead got scary, we decided to pack everything in the trailer and went mobile."
And now is both fixed and mobile with a new brick-and-mortar presence on College Avenue in Fayetteville. How Honed In began sharpening knives one place then another and survived the pandemic — that's next week on our Bricks, Mortar and Beyond series.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
