The Story of "Versengtarn"
Once upon a time in a basement in Minnesota, KommandoStore (then Nugget Enterprises) was born - and until recently, our lifeblood was surplus. So much so that one of our first "original" products wasn't much "manufacturing" on our end.
Spawning from experiments in a small army of top-loading washers, we embarked on our quest to di- er, Dye the universal symbol of "look at me, im a KommandoStore customer": Flecktarn.
The German Military's "Flecktarn" garments are on the very very peak of what's widely considered the best collectible surplus both on and off our store - we know this, because despite our best efforts to keep it in stock, people have been buying them hand over fist from us for over a decade.
Thing is that people tend to forget the dictionary definition of surplus. It's gear in excess — stuff the primary military force that was using it, no longer needs and auctioned off instead of destroying it.
We've been in business long enough to see surplus come, go, and become "rare". While flecktarn & it's 90s garment styles have only shown signs of being discontinued recently, surplus is not forever.
That was certainly evident when in the mid-2010s, rumors of the Bundeswehr literally burning surplus flecktarn in order to destroy it began to circulate on the 'net. Albeit knee-jerkingly, we wanted to pay homage to our favorite garment, our favorite camo, and protest the would-be burning of a beloved piece of militaria.
So, we got to work experimenting and making our very first batches of "Versengtarn".
What is Versengtarn all About?
"Versengtarn" from the German versengt “scorched” and tarnen “camouflage.” This is our coined term to the result of dyeing the flecktarn garments a deep, ashy black color much akin to a charred forest. When it first emerged from our dye lab (a bunch of top-load washers), we were instantly in love.
We originally went as far as adding a few modifications to the parka for the "Full Versengtarn" as opposed to the "Lite" with just a dye job — a poacher's pocket, a zipped shoulder pocket with a hilariously large velcro patch area so everyone at the airsoft field would be jealous, and a stolen feature from surplus "Polizei" parkas, deployable retro-reflective panels.
The cool factor grabs you by the neck, swings you around like a cowboy's lasso, and throws you into a freak, gasoline-ignited explosive inferno. Its undeniably badass. You guys loved it too - every time it went on hiatus, we were harassed by everyone, including people we'd hire along the way in our business growing, to make more.
We weren't even done there. We dyed field shirts, Tee shirts, and essentially made a family of the most unique surplus flecktarn products on the internet in one fell swoop.
All without using the word "Sustainable" or "Upcycled" in our marketing, somehow. Without a doubt, however, we were giving new life to an otherwise extremely common set of garments on the market. A life which, for flecktarn fanatics, might even get them to adopt another parka or field shirt. If giving this surplus new life was the mission, at its core was our "Secret Formula".
The Not-So-Secret Formula.
Surplus dyeing isn't new. In fact, it's so not new that you can find forum posts dating back to the early 2000s with people submerging garments in Rit Dye and posting the results.
We won't dunk on those guys, some of the combos are so cool they even inspired us to take a swing at cloning it, like with DPM "Nightshade" camo (but we're taking credit for the name).
The key is reactive dye. The best way to explain how it's different is to start with the wildly popular alternative, pigment dye.
Pigment dye behaves like paint. It has a bonding agent that makes it "stick" to all kinds of different surfaces. Whether it's synthetic or natural, 'Rit dye don't give a Sh*t. It's fantastic for tactical gear applications, until you have to clean it.
Rit dye isn't colorfast over time. In other words, if you throw a rit-dyed piece of surplus in the wash a few times, not only does it lose its color, it weeps it onto everything else in the wash. Not Good.
Reactive dye works differently. Instead of using a bonding agent, it's a chemical composition that only bonds with natural fibers, leaving all synthetics untouched. While it wont color your buttons, velcro, zippers, or buckles, we actually like the way it avoids those. It leaves traces of the original garment while doing a much better job dyeing overall.
The result is that it doesn't cover the material or pattern beneath it - instead, it "tints" it a desired shade, and permanently bonds to the fabric without a harsh chemical residue (due to the lack of a bonding agent).
Throw it in the wash and it'll stay that color and not make your tightie-whities another color. Throw it in the wash a bunch more and you'll notice it doesn't fade. It's just better.
We started experimenting with the right amount of dye, the washing machine knob dance required to get things to cycle properly, and getting a few made.
Eventually when we wanted to bring them back we had them professionally dyed but it was exceptionally hard to find a dye house who would work with used garments — something even the dye house we worked with for a couple years decided to change their mind on and shut the project down.
If you want something done right...
So naturally we bought a bunch of machines, blew the dust off our old recipes, and began work on how we could do it in-house. Once thought unthinkable at any reasonable volume, we'd grown from a 4-employee operation to over 20 in the span of our more recent years.
We had an army; we just needed the machines. So after a lot of work getting the operation dialed in with the exact recipie needed to make Versengtarn in the same way every time, we officially begun dyeing everything in house, purely with warehouse-ivans as labor.
As far as we're aware, nobody else on the internet does something remotely similar at the same scale and with the same level of care we do. Flecktarn that turns into versengtarn is pre-inspected, dyed, re-laundered, and sorted again before it goes into stock on our store.
Hiccups happen, as do some strange accidental dye variations, but we managed to nail it down to a science.
Sometimes different fabric compositions can lead to stuff like this. Neat!
What was once musty surplus is likely cleaner than it has been in a long time, is blem-free, and of course is backed by our usual slew of guarantees.
Its one of the many examples of projects on our store that were an autistic interest of ours, a subsequent shot in the dark to see if you guys liked it, and a rousing success that would carry us along our way for many years to come.
We couldn't do it without your support, and so long as regular flecktarn surplus lands in our laps, a good chunk of it will get "Scorched"...