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A conversation with Chris McKleroy, founder of NOCS Provisions.
Available on Apple and Spotify.
In this episode of Imagine If, Janet Kraus sits down with Chris McKleroy, founder and CEO of NOCS Provisions, to talk about birding, binoculars, sustainability, mindfulness, and the growing desire many people have to reconnect with nature.
But this conversation goes far beyond outdoor gear. Janet and Chris explore how birdwatching and spending time in nature can improve awareness, mindfulness, curiosity, and our sense of interconnectedness with the natural world.
They also discuss:
- Why birding has exploded in popularity
- How binoculars help people feel more present outdoors
- Sustainable product design and reducing environmental impact
- Conscious entrepreneurship and values-driven brands
- Why younger generations are craving more connection to nature
- The emotional and mental health benefits of slowing down outside
- How businesses can build sustainability into their DNA from the beginning
Chris also opens up about designing NOCS Provisions around environmental responsibility, including plastic-free packaging, carbon emissions reduction, nonprofit partnerships, and support for organizations that help kids access outdoor experiences.
Whether you love hiking, birding, camping, sustainability, mindfulness, or simply want to feel more connected to the world around you, this episode offers a thoughtful conversation about nature, design, and paying attention to the details we often miss.
About Chris McKleroy
Chris McKleroy is the founder and CEO of Nocs Provisions, an outdoor optics brand known for its modern, compact, and waterproof binoculars. He launched the company in 2019 to make binoculars more accessible, stylish, and adventure-friendly for everyday outdoor enthusiasts. Before Nocs, he co-founded Boombotix, and he is known for blending product design, sustainability, and outdoor culture into the brand’s identity.
Meet the Host:
- Janet Kraus: I’m Janet, a serial start-up founder and CEO, twin-girl mom, and wife to a fun and funny guy. I am on a mission to build healthier thinking in young people, stop toxic division, spotlight hopeful climate action, and advocate for safe AI.
Transcript
Janet Kraus: Hi Bluedotters, welcome back. Today we're gonna be talking to someone whose company and product brings me back to two summers ago when my family and I were on safari in Kenya. And the reason it brings me back is because never before had I had an experience of not wanting to let go of my binoculars.
I hadn't actually ever really used binoculars before, to be honest. But when you wake up at the crack of dawn and get onto a Jeep, and there in the Jeep are these binoculars, and you put them up to your eyes just as the sun is rising, you suddenly go into this place and this space of being transported into a three-dimensional different virtual reality.
And there you are, face to face with a giraffe. It is truly life reorienting. And I hadn't known much about binoculars at all. Literally, I had a pair that my grandmother left to me that were in some leather case. But I became this fervent user of them. And then I learned about the guest we're about to bring on to the show today, who, well, I'm gonna let him tell us his story.
So I want to, with no further ado, welcome to the show Chris McKleroy, founder and CEO of Nocs Provisions, a company that is on a mission to help people return to nature as the source of truth, which I love. And by the way, create the coolest, super-est, highest quality binoculars and monoculars, I think, on the market today.
So welcome, Chris.
Chris McKleroy: Well, thank you. Thanks so much for having me today, this morning. Yeah, it's been a really exciting journey over the years starting Nocs Provisions exactly with that mission in mind. I'm a serial entrepreneur, maybe working on achieving serial entrepreneur status, but my whole life has been spent in startups.
I've really understood the whole value creation process, product design, and what it takes to make something. And I think that behind the scenes on the brand side, if you're making a product, you create a lot of waste. I mean, just inherently. You sell a product to a customer, that's great. But what about the hundreds of units that come out that have, like, a little typo on the packaging or a defective firmware update or something where not a lot of people see the returns and the waste, and you have to go, “What do we do with these? How do we fix these, or what do we do? Can we recycle this?” And I'm sorry I'm starting with this. It just came to mind thinking about my journey and my process as an entrepreneur in product, which was really around that behind-the-scenes view of making something. You have to be responsible. You don't just make something willy-nilly. There is a huge environmental impact. There are raw materials that need to be mined and trucked to a factory to be processed, to be sold to another factory, to be assembled by a ton of people, to be packaged, shipped halfway across the world to another warehouse where they're trucked again to an end user.
There's a lot of emissions. There's a lot of waste. There's a lot of energy used in this whole process. Having started a previous business and seen a lot of that, and seen the behind the scenes, I've gone, “Man, I did that.” That thing that you designed, there's a pallet of junk that is returned, that doesn't work, etc. And there's a tremendous responsibility in making a product. And binoculars as a product checked a lot of those boxes, mainly in the sense that this product isn't just like a little trinket that sits on your desk. Ultimately, inherently, this thing allows you to see the world up close, right? So that giraffe that you saw.
When you see a giraffe, you might see a giraffe, the silhouette of a giraffe. Everyone can picture that in their mind. But with a tool like binoculars, you might see a giraffe having to bat its eyelid to get a fly out of the way. It might spit, you know? And you're like, “Wow.” Like it's such… it's a way to just intimately connect with nature. And ultimately, in that founding process, it was this idea of if we can form a more intimate connection with these wild animals that share the planet with us, that don't have healthcare, that don't have a safe way — they are out there fending for themselves on their own every day.
They don't pay taxes, which is cool. But the animals, if we can have a more intimate connection with them, we can realize just how precious this ecosystem is, that they're out there surviving on their own, that we're sharing this world with these species that are magnificent. And ultimately, that was really what pushed me over the edge to say, “You know, it's a big responsibility to make products and ship them across the world, but we're gonna do it.”
Janet Kraus: I just love the way in, like, your opening, you connected the dots between noticing the waste that is created in the supply chain, which those of us who are entrepreneurs understand, and this notion of getting closer to an ecosystem that keeps itself in balance, and add into that the responsibility that we as humans have to striving to help create that balance so that we have into our future and our children's future and our children's children's future the ability to look at the, by the way, incredibly long tongue of a giraffe as they pull that leaf off a tree that's just insanely high.
That was a beautiful ecosystem start. But may I, if I can, just take you back to that “aha” moment where you said to yourself, “I think the world needs a product that doesn't exist”? Just like, what was the spark? What happened?
Chris McKleroy: I would say I'm a slow thinker, slow mover in a sense. I love to chew on ideas for a while, and a good friend of mine, a roommate, had come in after the Outside Lands Music Festival. We were living out in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco, and he had come back from the music festival and said, “You know, if only I had some binoculars, but not just any binoculars, some stylish binoculars, so you don't look like a creep at this music festival.” That's interesting. Stylish binoculars, huh? And then I started to take a look at the market and realized that the market was pretty much flooded with a lot of the same looking and feeling products from the same brands.
Black tactical binoculars from brands that serve a very specific use are usually more expensive. And for me, just going, “I just wanna go camp. I just wanna go look at birds and raccoons.” It would be nice if there was a pair of binoculars that was like 100 bucks that just had everything I needed that I could just get started with.
And as a product person, I distinctly remember going to REI, going to sporting goods stores, going to camera shops and realizing, I'm confused. I'm very confused that these specs are the same on this one that's $1,000. Am I a sucker for not buying a $500 pair of binoculars? Like, is that good or bad? It was just a very confusing landscape. So I started peeling back those layers and looking into it as to just what is a great quality binocular. At what price is just a great quality binocular to go to a music festival, to go take a hike on the beach, to go check out the birds in your backyard, to bring on a safari? What is the right thing? And I peeled back those layers and realized in that process that there was no brand in this space speaking to this younger person or this more casual user. There were a ton of brands that are like, “How many points on that buck's head are you going for? We'll get you the perfect binoculars.”
But there wasn't anything that was just accessible, simple, and I would say from a design perspective, they shared a lot of this military industrial tactical feel, which is the origin of this tool hundreds of years ago, centuries ago, right? But it just felt so stale. So at that moment we bought some sample binoculars. We just bought some, started using them, and went, “Whoa, the birds in the backyard are interesting. We can check the surf from our front porch in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco. We can bring them camping. We can check out the little scrub jays zooming around.” And ultimately, it was this feeling of binoculars are awesome, and I grew up using them in football games. Really, that was the only experience. But binoculars are awesome, and there's no one talking to me or my friends.
Janet Kraus: Right. No, it's true. I mean, literally to think I was nearly 60 when I had my first experience with binoculars because they're not oriented such that I would take them everywhere or for anything just to get myself sort of more immersed and closer to the source of, well, as you said, truth, but in this case, just feeling more connected to whatever it is I'm involved in.
And in a world where, golly, everything is passing by so fast and so chaotically, to be able to have the ability to slow down and get more connected — I mean, you're hearing that everywhere. How do we get more intentional, slow down, get more meditative? You saw that connection of how to sort of, through even just the design of it, bring this thing, this wonderful thing into more of the everyday consumer, is what I'm hearing.
Chris McKleroy: Absolutely. Absolutely. How can we help people notice more around them, right?
Janet Kraus: Hmm
Chris McKleroy: And how can we help people notice more and at that level of detail, right? The abstraction of a giraffe, we can all picture a giraffe in our head. We can draw it on the whiteboard. But to see the eyeballs of a giraffe.
Janet Kraus: Long eyelashes.
Chris McKleroy: To see the long eyelashes that are keeping the flies at bay, realizing this giant majestic creature is so annoyed, the way that we get annoyed. It's the same consistency, we're all made of the same stuff. And I think that shared sense of presence and being is a really strong feeling that I think helps us feel more connected to our natural world.
Just as a brand, it's a platform, and it's a way to communicate. It's a way to set an example. It's a way to show up. It is a lot of responsibility beyond just making a product. It's how you show up, it's how you speak, it's what example you set. And I think we were very mindful early on to make sure that as a brand, we were trying to show up with our best foot forward.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, I can tell that from your About page. You talk about all the intentionality of every part of it, and I would love it if you would — you don't have to go through the entire thing, but if you could share some of the tenets of your mission, because when you start with a product company like binoculars, you think to yourself, “Well, your mission is to sell people binoculars.”
But you really thought carefully about what it is this company is trying to do for us as humans through a product. So anything that you want to share about the mission would be… I got a part of it, that we're trying to return to nature as a source of truth, but you have other parts to your why.
Chris McKleroy: Totally. It's been a fun brand to build in that sense that we don't just necessarily — we have not had a cookie-cutter mission over the course of our company. But we've had… I think we've said the same thing 10 different ways. Really where we are is, Nocs exists for people who see the world differently, curious explorers who find meaning in the details that most others pass by.
And ultimately, we help build tools that help people notice more. You know, ultimately turning everyday moments outside into richer experiences that stay with you long after that moment passes. And we do it by creating products that reveal the details of the natural world, spark curiosity through approachable design, and stand up to real life outside. Durable tools made to go everywhere that curiosity leads.
Janet Kraus: I love it. I love it. It's just so much more than the product itself. It really is about enhancing the human experience. I would love for you to express if you can, when you go out in nature and you get closer to it and you start to notice the details, do you feel a shift in you? Like, does something happen that you wanna tell us so that, if you've never had this experience, you can kind of begin to get into the psyche of what this does?
Chris McKleroy: Well, there's two things on that. One is I think I'm addicted to being in nature. We moved out of San Francisco in 2020 up to the mountains in Tahoe, and I feel like I'll spend… We're right here on a beautiful river. We're just nestled in this beautiful natural enclave. We spend our working meetings walking along a river.
Janet Kraus: Wow, really? That's awesome.
Chris McKleroy: Yeah, it's really quite nice. You know, it's a trade-off of the cultural dynamic that you might get in a city, but we're truly — we're not like halfway, one foot… We're fully just in nature. So anyhow, I feel very used to that feeling. Spend a lot of time in nature.
But one thing that I've really enjoyed and feel really connected and immersed with nature is around birds. It was a shock. When we were formulating Nocs, there was this huge open space that was birders. When I look at birders, I look at the Audubon website or other established birding organizations, and I'm seeing a lot of older people who don't look very hip to a new product offering, let's say.
And then you have hunters. These are the two power users of binoculars. And the hunters, they're taken care of. There are a lot of brands speaking their language, great quality product. They're all set. And so we launched this as this casual, approachable brand to go camping, traveling, hiking, surfing, just basic-use cases with a $100 binocular.
And we found that the birding community had embraced our brand for what we were about, for our design, for the product quality. And slowly but surely, we just found a home in birding, and birding as a category since COVID has gotten more popular for great reason. But for myself, I noticed I'm becoming — I have become — a birder, and it's fascinating.
Janet Kraus: What does it feel like when you become a birder? What happens to you?
Chris McKleroy: There's a level of attunement to your surroundings, where you're always paying attention for anything moving, a wild animal. Bonus points for seeing a little river otter or a beaver. But the actual idea of noticing a bird and trying to quickly check its size, check its shape, how low it's flying.
Is it in the trees? Is it on the ground? What color is it? How big is it? And usually, in your own circumstance, you might go, “OK, another robin. Cool. That's a woodpecker. Cool.” But then you might see, like, a sooty grouse. Just this awareness. You're always trying to tune into the little wild creatures that are around you.
And I found recently, this really clicked when my team and I went to our manufacturing facility overseas. We got off the airplane, and we saw a bird, and we're like, “None of us have ever seen this bird before. This is like uncharted territory.” And we spent the rest of the week just… I think we counted 19 birds or something. Yeah. But it was just such an amazing way to feel present in the natural world that's shared with these creatures that aren't human beings.
Janet Kraus: So say more about… I mean, I love this. Here you are, surfer dude, and suddenly you're finding yourself in this category of observation that you never anticipated. But bring me more into the feeling, if you can, what it feels like energetically. What does it feel like in your body when you start to actually get that close to detail and start to be passionately wanting to slow down enough to find our connection. What does that feel like?
Chris McKleroy: I can think of two distinct feelings. One feeling is really this feeling of interconnectedness. If you're able to see the detail of a beaver nibbling on a piece of wood or a deer staring at you, and you're staring into the whites of a deer's eyes.
And I think you start… for myself, the feeling is this deep feeling of interconnectedness. That we're all made of the same stuff. That we're not just a removed species from this world. We're all inhabitants of this planet. We all breathe the same air. We're eating the same food. And there's this shared energy that exists in all of these living things.
And there's this deep, yeah, a deep feeling of interconnectedness. So I think that feeling of we walk around in our own heads, we're fed our little phones that give us all this content all day, but that ability to just see a creature that doesn't have a phone or a supermarket.
Janet Kraus: Right. As you said, they're just out there fending for themselves and…
Chris McKleroy: Any sort out there living wild on the same earth in our same backyard, but they have the exact same stuff within. They've got two eyes. They breathe the same air. So I just think that feeling of interconnectedness is really what I hope as a brand we can help bring to as many people as possible.
Janet Kraus: Amazing. Now, I read on your website, which is, as I said, very filled with amazing things, you've created a partnership with the California Academy of Sciences Science Action Club. And you do some work with middle schoolers. I'm curious to know, you must have observed it, what do kids get when you put binoculars in their hands?
Chris McKleroy: That's a really interesting juxtaposition between putting a phone in a kid's hands, which feels like it's almost like a gravitational pull inward, versus with the binoculars, it's just such a sense of awe. It's such a sense of awe, and sometimes it's just, you know, you might not even be looking at a creature or a bird. You just look using this tool that magnifies the world in front of you, that creates this portal of presence, I think.
Janet Kraus: Portal of presence. I love that. That's what I feel like when I have binoculars. It doesn't feel like it's just my eyes. It feels like it's my ears. It feels like it's my sense of smell. Everything gets expanded, amplified.
Chris McKleroy: Absolutely. You're putting on, in a sense, this portal. It blocks out all of your periphery to just be focused on one thing, and I think that just in itself with younger people, it's awe-inspiring. And I think, like most everyone else, just the ability to visually tune out all the extraneous details in your periphery into the one thing that you're focused on. I mean, we haven't put brainwave monitors on, but it seems pretty nice for your mind.
Janet Kraus: Yeah, I mean, when I read that and I was thinking about we, my husband and I, didn't give our kids phones until eighth grade, but if I could have done one thing differently, I think, and you would have needed to exist, I would've put binoculars in their hands.
Chris McKleroy: Hmm.
Janet Kraus: They are outdoorsy kids, but to actually have them feel that experience, 'cause they hadn't experienced that either until we went on safari, and then they were like, “What?” Right?
Chris McKleroy: What? Yeah. They're a great tool as well. You can flip them upside down and any pair of binoculars with magnifying optics, if you use them backwards and you hover it about 5 or 10 millimeters off of the ground. You can actually see like a magnified view, almost like a microscopic magnified view of rocks and dirt and bugs and small details like that. That would be really fun to just have a pair of binoculars as a kid.
Janet Kraus: I'm seeing an ad campaign right here, all around kids. Give your kids binoculars, not an iPhone.
Chris McKleroy: Totally. Yeah. And we've been really proud to be able to support organizations like the afterschool nature organizations providing binoculars and backpacks. As a brand, we've donated over 100,000 pairs of optics to probably 100 different organizations plus.
We've worked with a ton of nonprofits that are really out there doing the work with the right mission, with the right mindset. I mean, to zoom out with our brand, from the very beginning, we've done three things that I think are, I want to call them table stakes, for any brand today that's thinking of getting started.
And I'm really proud that we did this from our foundation because what we've seen is a return on values, is a return on giving back because… And we did it just because that's the right thing to do. But as you start to get into the world, a retailer like REI, sure they love a great product and they love something that has great product market fit, but they care about the brands, what they're doing as a brand to give back, what they're doing as a brand to reduce carbon emissions, what they're doing out there beyond just making product. It's actually very important as you get further and further into the supply chain and distribution networks of the modern retail environment. So from launch, we've been really proud to give back. And when I say give back, we've done three things. One is the table stakes, plastic-free packaging.
I spoke to this in the beginning of the interview. When you run a company and you run a brand, I'm sure you might have seen this too, the amount of poly bags.
Janet Kraus: I was in fashion. Tell me about it.
Chris McKleroy: Insane, right? It's insane. We did find a way to upcycle at my previous businesses. We'd upcycle our poly bags into dog walk poop bags, which was pretty silly. So plastic-free packaging since launch. Our manufacturer's like, “What are you doing?” They put three poly bags on every other binocular.
Plastic-free, we took that risk. We show that, like our package, you can take the product out, you can recycle the package. You don't have to feel guilty. You don't have to disassemble it.
Janet Kraus: I love that.
Chris McKleroy: Easy, simple, clean. Originally, they were printed in just soy ink. They still are printed in soy ink on the inside of the box, just for simplicity.
The second thing is giving back. We signed up for 1% for the Planet. 1% for the Planet is an organization that says, “Hey, 1% of your total revenue needs to be spent giving back,” half of which can be through monetary donations, half of which can be through product donations. We signed up for this. We found our first organization we worked with in the Outer Sunset, Trips for Kids.
And really through this lens of 1% for the Planet, it wasn't, “Ah, let's do a beach cleanup,” right? Doing a beach cleanup for surfer dudes, do they really need help? I don't think so. I think they're all pretty well taken care of. But how about looking at organizations where we can bring people from communities that might not have access to nature, that might not have a culture of going to nature? How can we find those orgs doing that work, bringing those people who don't have that same access into nature and give them that experience?
Janet Kraus: Oh my God, I love that.
Chris McKleroy: The rooting, launching foundational value that we have around our philanthropic efforts. So that's kind of the lens of how we give back. So we really want to support those organizations doing the work.
Janet Kraus: Pause there. I want to hear the third one, but before you go to the third one, how are you getting the product into the hands of young people who live in cities and don't have as much access to nature?
Chris McKleroy: Well, you know, one of the first organizations that we worked with was Trips for Kids Marin, and that's an organization that was founded with the principle of helping bring kids without access to nature actually into nature and on bikes. And kids in the Mission in San Francisco going to Golden Gate Park and ripping around on bikes out to the ocean and back, and that was just something that really resonated with me living by the ocean, riding through Golden Gate Park every day.
And just, I think there are organizations out there doing the work, and it's our job to get out of the way and do what we do, which can be to provide them with financial resources and provide them with binocular resources. So really it's us helping just align and find these brilliant nonprofits that are helping lead young girls on surf outings or organizations bringing people into nature camps.
Janet Kraus: I'm so impressed, and I'm sure for any of the folks who are listening today, it sounds like if you're working with organizations, you need to figure out how to get associated with 1% for the Planet and get in the pipeline for how you can connect if this sounds interesting.
Chris McKleroy: Through 1% for the Planet, it was a commitment from the early days. I mean, every young entrepreneur is gonna say, “Ah, 1%? That's nothing.” Well, you know what? If you stick with it and your company continues to grow, it really is something. And the last thing is we measure all of our carbon emissions.
Now, we don't go put little sensors on top of all of our factory smokestacks, but we use this method called the BEE Method, and through the Change Climate Project, formerly known as Climate Neutral, we measure and calculate all of our carbon emissions that we do as a brand and basically do two things. We figure out ways to reduce them, because that's the most important, right? We fund carbon capture efforts.
Now, it would be a huge mistake for someone to think that we are offsetting our carbon emissions because that's not the right language. But we're doing our best to measure, reduce, and fund projects that are helping rebalance this in proportion with how much emissions we emit.
Janet Kraus: Amazing. Thank you for that. Is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have that you'd like to share?
Chris McKleroy: The only thing I want to share, I think, is the power of good design.
You could do everything that we've talked about. We're gonna start a binocular company, and it's, “Oh, we love to connect with the world,” and all the stuff that I've said. We're gonna make a binocular company, dot, dot, dot. But if you just go to a factory and you're like, “How about those ones?” and make 'em pink, it would not have worked. And I think that part of that foundational process of building the brand and building the company and building the product was this obsessive approach around how to create a product that could sit in someone's hands and they would feel like, “I like this thing.” It's not offensive. It passes the test for when you're out camping and you're… or if you're out hiking in Big Sur and your consciousness is all over the place, and you grab a pair of binoculars and you look at them and you're like, “Are these from the military industrial complex? What is the meaning of this thing?”
Versus something that is designed in a way to make you feel comfortable in nature, that it fits in nature. I think the design language that we've used just creates a subconscious feeling that it's a gentle product that is meant to be used however you want to use it.
Janet Kraus: I mean, when we talk about what if you switched from giving your kid an iPhone — by the way, they sweat over the details of how that thing… right? Steve Jobs was obsessed with design, which is why it's so lovely and addictive, and you've done the same thing to just really think about every single detail of how it looks.
And I was reading that even in your partnership with Audubon, you have created the speckled dots that look like a specific bird egg, or I think you did that a couple of times, and that's literally like exactly the same as what you're talking about in the experience of the product, is that you're able to see these tiny details.
Chris McKleroy: Totally. Yeah. Thanks for mentioning that. We're really excited to be working with the Audubon Society. They are the oldest heritage organization in conservation through birding. And we're just psyched to help drive awareness to that organization with these amazing products. We've got a multi-year partnership coming with incredibly beautiful products in the works.
And then one thing, talking about mindful design, is that all of our products have been designed so you can take a picture through them.
Janet Kraus: I missed that. Say more.
Chris McKleroy: It's just, you can do this with most binoculars, but most aren't necessarily designed for this. We really obsessed over kind of the eye relief and the eye cup shape to be comfortable on the eyes, but to space it out just enough that you could put your iPhone or your Pixel or your Galaxy up to the back of the binocular and take a photo or video through the product. We wanted to make that as easy as possible. And that's been really cool because our community's sharing not just photos of them using the product, but the actual benefit of the product. They're sharing the water buffalo coming out of a pond, and it's just so cool to see where these binoculars go in the world. It's been a great journey. And it, again, it's this combination, I think, of the brand making sure that that's mindfully and meticulously considered in the product, and really just putting our best foot forward in the world to create a platform to hopefully advocate for this interconnectedness, for helping people notice more, and creating products that back up that promise.
Janet Kraus: Our podcast is called Imagine If, so I would love for you to finish the sentence: “Imagine if…” Let our listeners imagine what you can imagine.
Chris McKleroy: Imagine if our policies as a globe, our global policies, took into consideration the natural beings outside of just humanity, outside of just the economy, but really the lives of all the natural beings on Earth. Imagine if those policies took into consideration the breadth of living things rather than just driving up a spreadsheet to the right.
Janet Kraus: If we did that, if we thought about the owls, and the growling dogs, and the zebras with their tails batting flies, and the giraffes with their long eyelids and eyelashes, yeah, if we incorporated all of that into our policies, the world would be more in balance, and that's an amazing thought.
Thank you so much for being here today and for creating a great company.
Chris McKleroy: It's been a pleasure to chat with you today.
