WHEN VOLLEBAK BECAME MORE THAN A BRAND
You don’t expect to open an email from one of your favorite companies and see your own life staring back at you. But that’s what happened.
I was still in the thick of the aftermath — those first disorienting days after the Lahaina fire, when nothing felt steady and every part of daily life felt blurred and unstable. Then suddenly, there it was: a Vollebak email written to their entire community, telling my story with more care than I could have imagined.
It felt surreal.
The brand whose storytelling had inspired my own — the company whose voice helped shape how I write about photography, travel, and creative intention — was now writing about me. And not lightly. They shared my story with sincerity, empathy, and humanity. They saw me at a moment when everything felt chaotic. They showed up when they didn’t have to. And they did it with a level of care that caught me off guard.
My home was gone.
Very little made it out. My wife managed to grab my hard drives and primary camera bag before evacuating — one small thread of continuity in an otherwise overwhelming loss.
But nearly all the physical objects that formed the texture of daily life — clothing, equipment, tools, the ordinary things that quietly define a sense of identity — were gone. Among them was my Vollebak kit: the clothing I primarily wore when traveling or photographing in the field, the pieces that helped me shift into a different mindset. They weren’t “just clothes.” They were part of how I stepped into focus and intention — a small ritual that helped me drop into the work.
Losing them took away more than fabric.
It disrupted a rhythm I had spent years building.
In the middle of all this, I reached out to Vollebak.
I wasn’t asking for anything.
I wasn’t expecting anything.
I simply wrote honestly about what had happened — how much their clothing had meant to me over the years, how much their storytelling had inspired me, and how losing everything had left me disoriented. It felt like one of the few threads I could still touch.
Their response came quickly.
And it wasn’t corporate or distant.
Multiple people from their team reached out — each message more personal than the last. They weren’t writing from a script. They weren’t offering platitudes. They were simply showing up with kindness.
And then they said something I will never forget:
“We’d like to replace as many pieces as we can.”
No hesitation.
No conditions.
Just generosity — the kind that comes from people rather than policy.
It broke me open — not because of the value of the items, but because of the humanity behind the gesture.
When the packages arrived, something shifted. Until then, the idea of traveling or photographing again felt impossibly far away. Losing my home and most of my belongings took away the foundation beneath me. But those boxes gave me a small sense of center. A foothold in an otherwise disorienting landscape.
They didn’t fix everything.
But they reminded me that I hadn’t lost every part of myself.
In the weeks after the fire, kindness poured in from friends, collectors, and strangers around the world — support I’ll always be grateful for. But what Vollebak did resonated on a deeply personal level. This story is simply a thank you to them, written from steadiness rather than the rawness of the moment.
For years, I admired their creativity — the imagination behind their designs, the way they wrote about their garments, the way they wove story and innovation together. Their voice inspired my own. It changed how I approached my writing, my product pages, my emails, and my storytelling.
I never expected that the company that had fueled so much of my creative energy would one day lift me during one of the hardest moments of my life. But that’s what they did.
Their kindness helped me find a bit of ground again.
They helped me feel like I could step back into the world.
They helped me reconnect with a part of myself that I was afraid had disappeared.
To the entire Vollebak team: thank you.
For the humanity.
For the sincerity.
For showing up when life had been stripped down to its essentials.
Kindness doesn’t rebuild everything.
But it gives you enough strength to take the next step.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.
For anyone curious, Vollebak is exactly what they appear to be — wildly imaginative, beautifully made, and grounded in real human values. Their work lives at vollebak.com
Hi, I’m Scott Reither—fine art photographer, educator, and the founder of The Curated Landscape.
I created this space to share reflections and tools for photographers who want to go deeper—into their craft, their process, and how they connect with the world through the lens.
