Sarah Calhoun: Red Ants Pants Pioneer
Updated: February 20, 2025
Sarah Calhoun is a businesswoman and social entrepreneur who founded the Red Ants Pants women’s workwear company and later the Red Ants Pants Music Festival in White Sulphur Springs, Montana.
Who Sarah Calhoun Is
Sarah Calhoun was born in 1979 and grew up on a farm in rural Connecticut, later earning a degree in environmental science (environmental studies) from Gettysburg College. After college she worked in outdoor education and on trail crews for groups like Outward Bound and Youth Corps, doing physically demanding jobs in the backcountry. Those experiences exposed her to the problem that most heavy‑duty work clothing was designed for men, not for women with different body shapes.
She was inspired to move to Montana after reading Ivan Doig’s memoir This House of Sky, choosing to live in a small ranching community rather than a big city. She eventually settled in White Sulphur Springs, a town of about 900 people, and became known as a leader focused on rural communities, women’s leadership, and local agriculture.
How She Started Red Ants Pants
While leading trail crews and doing outdoor labor, Calhoun grew frustrated that she had to wear men’s work pants that fit poorly and were uncomfortable for women doing the same jobs. Around 2004 she began researching how to design rugged work pants specifically for women, entering what she later called a “tricky flow of research and homework” to learn about fabric, fit, and manufacturing.
She moved to Bozeman, bought a “how to start a small business” guide, and wrote a formal business plan for a women’s workwear company. After deciding she wanted to live in a rural ranching town, she relocated in 2005 to White Sulphur Springs and set up her office, storefront, and distribution center in an old historic saddle shop. In 2006 she officially opened the Red Ants Pants store there, launching what she has described as the first company dedicated to making heavy‑duty work pants for women.
Calhoun chose the name “Red Ants Pants” because in ant colonies the female ants do most of the work, which she saw as a fitting symbol for women in physical and blue‑collar jobs. The company focused on U.S.‑made clothing and used grassroots marketing, such as a “Tour de Pants” road trip in an Airstream trailer to introduce the pants to working women on farms, ranches, and job sites around the country.
From Pants to Music Festival
Calhoun’s success with the clothing business encouraged her to create a charitable foundation in 2011, the Red Ants Pants Foundation, to support three main goals: developing women’s leadership, preserving working family farms and ranches, and enriching rural communities. That same year she launched the Red Ants Pants Music Festival in a cow pasture just outside White Sulphur Springs as a way to bring people together, boost the local economy, and raise money for the foundation.
The festival quickly began drawing thousands of people and big‑name performers, using music as a tool for community and economic development in a remote area. Calhoun has described the festival as “a shot in the dark” that turned into a major way to celebrate rural Montana while funding grants and leadership programs for women and rural projects across the state.
Updated: February 20, 2025