Sky High Farm: How a Nonprofit Farm Built a Clothing Brand to Fund Itself

Sky High Farm started as a sculpture studio and became a working farm that donates every pound of food it grows. A decade later, that same farm inspired a clothing label built specifically to help pay for it.

Founder Dan Colen never set out to build a fashion brand. The story of how a nonprofit farm ended up with collaborations from Denim Tears, Comme des Garçons, and Levi’s shows what happens when clothing exists to fund a mission rather than the other way around.

From Sculpture Studio to Working Farm

Dan Colen, a well-known New York artist whose work has shown at the Whitney Biennial and Gagosian, bought 40 acres of land in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2011. He originally planned to use it as a sculpture studio, a quiet escape from the downtown New York art scene he had been part of for years.

An Artist’s Escape That Became a Mission

Instead, Colen realized the land could do something bigger. Sky High Farm began growing fresh produce and raising livestock with a single purpose: donating everything it produced to food banks and pantries in the region. That shift from personal studio to community resource is an unusual brand story, since the mission came first and any commercial activity, including the clothing label that followed years later, was built to serve it.

Turning a Farm Into a Nonprofit

In 2020, Sky High Farm formally became a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit. That structural change let the organization expand its programming well beyond growing food, adding a fellowship program that trains new farmers and a grants initiative that prioritizes funding for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ farmers.

According to SSENSE’s reporting on the organization, Sky High Farm donated an estimated 87,000 pounds of fresh vegetables and 50,000 pounds of protein to food access organizations across New York state over its first decade. Numbers like that only reinforced the case for building a dedicated revenue stream that could scale alongside the farm’s growing ambitions.

Building a Clothing Label to Fund a Farm

In 2022, Colen partnered with Dover Street Market Paris’s brand incubator program to launch what became known as Sky High Farm Workwear, now operating as Sky High Farm Goods. Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market alum Daphne Seybold joined as co-founder and co-chief executive, bringing fashion industry experience the nonprofit side of the organization did not have.

The label operates under the tagline “Good Goods for Good,” and unlike most workwear brands, it exists specifically to generate revenue for something outside itself. The nonprofit farm and the for-profit clothing arm operate as legally separate entities, but the entire purpose of the clothing side is funneling proceeds back to the farm’s food security mission.

Collaborations That Do Double Duty

Sky High Farm’s clothing has drawn collaborations from an unusually wide range of names for a brand built around a food nonprofit, including Tremaine Emory’s Denim Tears, Comme des Garçons SHIRT, Converse, and Levi’s, which released a chore coat, jeans, and overalls under a joint Levi’s x Sky High Farm Goods line.

Each collaboration carries the farm’s signature moon and strawberry graphic, giving otherwise unrelated partner brands a consistent visual thread to build around. For collaborators, the appeal goes beyond design: partnering with Sky High Farm means directly funding food access work, adding a layer of purpose that a typical streetwear collaboration does not carry.

Materials as Part of the Mission

Sky High Farm’s clothing leans heavily on deadstock, upcycled, and organic materials, including workwear staples like denim chore coats and sturdy cotton shirts. That material choice is consistent with the farm’s regenerative agriculture practices, extending the same environmental thinking from the fields into the fabric.

For a brand whose entire premise depends on credibility, that consistency matters more than it would for a typical label. A clothing line raising money for food security would undercut its own story if the clothing itself ignored sustainability. Instead, the material choices function as proof that the mission runs through every part of the business model, not just the marketing.

What Independent Brands Can Learn From Sky High Farm

Sky High Farm shows that a clothing line can succeed by existing in service of something else entirely. Most brands start with a product and look for a story to attach to it. Sky High Farm did the reverse, starting with a mission and building the product to fund it.

The second lesson is in bringing in the right expertise at the right time. Colen had the mission and the artistic vision, but it was Daphne Seybold’s fashion industry background that turned the idea into a functioning label capable of landing collaborations with major names. And the third lesson is about consistency between message and materials: a cause-driven brand cannot only talk about its values, the product itself has to reflect them, or the entire premise falls apart under scrutiny.

Frequently Asked Questions about Sky High Farm