Realtree Xtra

In 1986, very early in the camouflage revolution, Bill Jordan decided to try his hand at designing a camo pattern. Bill had entered the hunting industry in 1983, when he started Spartan Archery Products in a back room of his father's boat dealership in Columbus, Georgia. Spartan manufactured t-shirts at a local mill, which were sold to a variety of large retail customers across the country. But the commodity garment trade was a tough, low-profit-margin business that depended on high volume—not easy for an established company and nearly impossible for a startup. Bill was pinching pennies and fishing bass tournaments on the side to create income. Meanwhile, he was constantly searching for ways to separate his company from the crowd. And that is how Bill came to be sitting in his parents' front yard one day in 1986, with paper and colored pencils, sketching and coloring the bark of a giant oak tree that grew there. Bill believed that by layering the images of twigs and leaves over a vertical bark background, he could create a three-dimensional appearance that would match a variety of terrain—and make his pattern distinct.