Our Mossy Oak tees come in two patterns, Bottomland and Treestand. They look related because they are. Both go back to Mossy Oak's first year, and one is literally built on top of the other. If you've ever wondered which to pick, this is the background.
1986, West Point, Mississippi
Mossy Oak was founded in 1986 by Toxey Haas in West Point, Mississippi. The origin story the company still tells is that Haas grabbed a fistful of dirt, bark, sticks, and leaves from the ground where he hunted and took it to a textile mill, asking them to match the colors exactly. What came back was Bottomland: a pattern of dark, muddy browns and blacks with shapes that mimic Mississippi red-oak bark. It was designed for turkey hunting and for flooded timber, where you're standing against a trunk in dim light and the last thing you want is a bright leaf print.
The same year Mossy Oak released a small family of patterns built on that base: Bottomland, Greenleaf, Full Foliage, Fall Foliage, and Treestand.
What Treestand is
Treestand takes the Bottomland bark as its background and lays a pattern of branches over it. The idea was to break up a hunter's outline against a sky background, since a bark-only pattern reads as a solid dark blob when you're above the ground with light behind you. It was redesigned in 2008 and has stayed in the lineup ever since. Visually it's lighter and busier than Bottomland, with more contrast between the branch shapes and the base.
Why Bottomland became the duck pattern
Mossy Oak released a muddier second version of Bottomland in 2003, then brought the original back. In January 2018 Ducks Unlimited named Original Bottomland its official flooded-timber pattern, and since then it's been the default camo for the green-timber crowd in Arkansas and Mississippi. In the Lowcountry, where we hunt open marsh and rice fields, nobody needs a bark pattern to kill a duck. But Bottomland has become something bigger than a hunting tool. It's the pattern people wear to town.
That's the nostalgia thing. Realtree and Mossy Oak both say their original 1980s and 90s patterns are among their best sellers again, and Mossy Oak's own people have said out loud that Bottomland "looks dang good when wearing it around town." That's exactly how we use it. Our Mossy Oak tees are casual wear. Nobody's wearing a cotton tee in a duck blind in January.
Which one to buy
Bottomland if you want the classic: darker, quieter, reads almost like a textured brown from across the room. It goes with everything and it's the one people recognize. Treestand if you want a little more going on: the branch overlay gives it more visual texture and it photographs with more contrast. Same shirt underneath, same heavyweight garment-washed cotton, same small duck mark on the chest, same price.
If you want both, the honest answer is that Bottomland is the one you'll reach for on a Tuesday and Treestand is the one people will ask you about.
A note on the name
Mossy Oak, Bottomland, and Treestand are registered trademarks of Haas Outdoors, and the patterns themselves are protected by copyright. We don't print them. We buy licensed blanks from Mossy Oak's licensed mills and add our mark, which is the only legitimate way a small brand gets to sell the real pattern. If you see a "bottomland" tee from a brand that isn't a licensee or isn't using licensed blanks, it isn't Bottomland.
Both patterns are on the Mossy Oak tee page, $40, sizes S through 3XL, preorder. For the history of the older blotch pattern on our duck camo hoodies, read where old school duck camo came from.