Iconic ’80s brand CB Sports is back and preparing for the future

At its height, CB Sports was a $45 million apparel company with 600 employees. (Phil and Tricia Pugliese, SkiTalk.com )

When I was 17 in the mid-1980s, I discovered a small burn hole in the front of my CB jacket. It might as well have been a hole in my heart. 

Here I was, the first time in my life that I actually owned something indisputably cool, and this happens. I didn’t even smoke cigarettes. 

I wore that jacket through the rest of high school and college, and through the ’90s, without a second thought. It performed flawlessly — surviving the Catskills, the Berkshires, the Adirondacks and the Greens — maintaining style and function every turn along the way. The cigarette hole became a badge of honor.

“A lot of people have fond memories of the CB gear that they had, and I get contacted from time to time from people telling me they still have their CB jackets,” said Charles Bird “CB” Vaughan, who launched the iconic brand in Bennington, Vt., in 1969. Vaughan — who set a world speed-skiing record of 106.89 miles per hour in 1963 — famously sold his CB stretch “Super Pant” out of the trunk of his car. Over the next 30 years, the CB Sports brand, boasting distinct colors and design styles, gained a cult-like following among skiers.

Vaughan now lives in Albuquerque, N.M.

“I knew from being out on the hill every day, I always had an idea of what I thought ski apparel design should be,” said Vaughan, who grew up five miles from “Big” Bromley and started skiing at age 6, eventually becoming a racer and spending four successive summers in Portillo, Chile. “You see this product and say, ‘How come it’s not designed this way?’ I thought I knew what the market needed.

“I couldn’t have been luckier. I don’t know if it was the ‘wow’ factor or the cool factor, but people wanted to be involved in the brand. With my ski racing background, I was fortunate to know a lot of people involved, the right people at the right time. And I think that market exists again.”

At its height, CB Sports was a $45 million apparel company with 600 employees, six retail stores and 850 dealers. However, it wasn’t long after Vaughan was forced to relinquish control of the company under economic pressures that the brand apparel all but disappeared. The last two retail stores shuttered in 2008, well after CB clothing was no longer being manufactured.

That all changed in 2021. CB Sports, now owned by Vertical Brands, is back. Christopher Neary, the CEO of Vertical Brands, hired Vaughan to be president of special markets, and, together, they believe they will recapture lightning in a bottle.

Neary recalled his own first CB jacket story. He was 12 years old and wanted what all the other cool kids were wearing in 1985, so he asked his mother for a CB jacket. Instead, she brought him to Macy’s and they came home with a Pacific Trail jacket, which Neary promptly lost in the schoolyard a few days later. His mother would wind up replacing it, this time, with something more authentic. 

“My mom brought me to ABC Sports in Little Silver, New Jersey, and bought me my first CB jacket,” Neary said. “Her rationale was that because I wanted it so much I wouldn’t lose it. I wore the cuffs out of that jacket and wore it to the point where it frayed.”

Neary went on to pursue a career in technical textiles, selling to some of the largest apparel companies in the world. He started Vertical Brands in 2001 as a product design development and bulk production management company in the technical apparel space. 

“CB Vaughan introduced himself to me around 2010 with the intention of buying the brand and relaunching it, but the price was out of reach,” Neary said. Ten years later, a venture capitalist friend of Neary approached him and asked what he would do with CB Sports if he bought it and sold it to Vertical Brands.

“I said, ‘I’d start with the Heritage Collection from the ’80s and literally not change it at all,’ ” Neary said. “So, for the fall 2021 relaunch, we replicated the same styles and the same colors and added some updated fabrics, but not too far from the originals.”

CB Sports was ahead of its time in technical fabrics, and some of those products are still relevant today, Neary said, like two-ply and three-ply supplex. Today, updated products implement environmentally friendly DWR (durable water repellency), a chemistry that didn’t exist in the 1980s. CB Sports plans to launch technical gloves and goggles later this year, a full CB Sports Pickleball Collection for next spring, and a technical outerwear line for 2024.

“Our goal, in a nutshell, is to bring back the authenticity of a core ski brand and provide retailers and consumers trendy, vintage fashion while at the same time providing new fashion and functional products,” Neary said.

Vertical Brands has opened more than 200 retail doors, including core East Coast specialty ski shops, some in the Midwest and some in the Rockies. They have partnered with the World Pro Ski Tour and have sponsored the Warren Miller Tour, at all the New England film screenings. 

Neary said CB Sports is getting a lot of famous brands interested in collaborating with them and already formed partnerships with high-end luggage brand T. Anthony, with Revo for photochromatic goggles, and with JCrew. More well-known brand collaborations are in the works, Neary said.

Vaughan is focused on leveraging his vast network of relationships in the industry, working with roughly 400 ski resorts in the U.S. where CB Sports might be able to do business. He is teaming up with on-mountain retailers, designing and building out kits for ski race teams, and working to supply uniforms for college and high school athletics programs.

“My role is to get the product back to the people that are trendsetters in the industry and also outside the industry,” he said. It is a formula for success that worked when Vaughan first built the company.

“We made sure we were in tune with the youth in America at that time, and the opportunity exists again this time,” Vaughan said. “Kids are really looking again to find something that can be their brand. I think the first opportunity is making sure our designs are the things people want to wear in the marketplace.” 

Again surrounded by the right people at the right time, Vaughan says there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t doodle his thoughts on designs or colors, on shoulder fit or the feel in a garment, its insulation, all those things. It’s a labor of love from his early years running CB Sports, when he made all the patterns himself.

“It’s a tremendous chapter of my life that I look back at with many fond memories,” Vaughan said. “It’s amazing now that we have the opportunity to build the brand back again.”