The GOAT Story Go Off-road Armor
Back in 2016 I bought a new LR4 and decked it out for some “Overlanding”, a newish term to me back then, having come from the Jeep world. Some college buddies of mine and I struck out for Utah for some statewide offroading over the course of a week. We stuck mostly to the deep desert, White Rim, and the south rim of Canyonlands National Park. After a long and glorious week of exploring, we headed back to Denver stopping off in Glenwood Springs for some much-needed showers, hot food, and some beverages. While sitting there enjoying our food at the Historic Doc Holiday’s Saloon, we were chatting about the trip, and one of my friends brought up the excessive pin striping on my black, and very new Land Rover. This sort of thing wasn’t new to me, having crushed several brand new paint jobs on Jeeps. I opened up that I had been pondering an idea to help protect vehicle panels from brush and branch strikes when wheeling. They thought it was a great idea and after a couple of well-timed shots of whiskey, we came up with Go Off-road Armor Tech or “GOAT”. Fast-forward a bit to early 2018, and I finally decided to pull the trigger on this idea. I had done some research and this isn’t a new idea, with a French company doing the same concept since as far back as 2003, as well as a few domestic companies doing this for Jeep 26
Wranglers. With a new Tacoma in the garage, I figured why not the Toyota crowd with the Toyota off-road pedigree and robust aftermarket. The first mockup and production set were ready in plain black by August 2018 and the website was up! Then it was crickets…. for a while. I realized that I needed to get this word out much more actively, and Instagram was the mechanism. Patterns grew, new models came out, the word got out, and the orders came in. What a surreal feeling to watch something that I created, grow. I am not a trained businessman nor seasoned entrepreneur. I was
