Cynthia Trone has been part of the Camden, Maine, community on the state’s coast for a long time. In the 1980s, she managed the Bay View Street location of a local store called The Grasshopper Shop, and decades later, in 2021, she came back to the same street to open another store. A few steps from the water, the store carries a name her family has used for half a century.
That store is Symmetree Base Camp, the Maine home of an apparel brand run by Trone’s son, Jackson Berger, and his partner, Skye Rainey. Trone opened the Camden storefront, the company’s first retail store, to sell Berger and Rainey’s original creations, and so the family brand would have a home in the region where it began. Berger is a graphic designer, and with Skye, the couple had a dream “to create meaningful art for a living.” In South Florida, the couple designs, screen prints, embroiders, and sews the apparel themselves, including T-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, sweatshirts, and hats.
The Symmetree concept started with Berger’s father and Trone’s ex-husband, Denis, in the 1970s, who made wooden toys and fine art, and continued through Cynthia and Denis’s home-furnishings store, the original Symmetree shop in Burlington, Vermont, which they owned when Jackson was a baby. Berger wanted to honor the name his parents had created, Trone told the PenBay Pilot, and now, she said, “It’s back to being my business name, again.” As the company explained, “The word Symmetree represents living a life balanced by nature and has become a small movement of like-minded thinkers, mindfully exploring from tree to sea.” It is, in the most literal sense, a family operation. Trone’s youngest daughter, Hadley Berger, has handled social media for the store, while Kayla Berger has helped keep the books. Jackson and Skye designed a line of Maine-inspired apparel specifically for the Camden shop, drawing on the rugged coastline that shaped Jackson.
Photo Courtesy Symmetree Base Camp
What ties the brand together across generations is a simple idea: that an apparel company can make doing right inseparable from how it operates. After noticing the brand’s footprint over time, Berger and Rainey decided they needed to do more than use environmentally friendly materials in production, such as water-based inks. They promised in 2020 that every shirt and hat Symmetree sells would help fund tree planting. The brand works with Eden: People+Planet, a reforestation organization that restores landscapes across Africa, Asia, and Central America, and hires local crews to plant.
For Berger and Rainey, the reasoning is practical as much as it is principled. Trees are among the most effective tools for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Although the company has promised to plant one tree for every shirt sold, the Penobscot Bay Regional Chamber of Commerce says that Symmetree Base Camp plants eight trees per item. “Each purchase supports meaningful reforestation efforts that help fight climate change, restore vital wildlife habitats, and protect the ecosystems our planet depends on,” Symmetree explains. The brand frames it plainly: a customer buys a shirt, a tree goes in the ground, and the money spent on a piece of apparel also funds paid work for people living in poverty around the world. As one of the business’s best-selling collections reads, “More Trees, Less Bullshit.”
The tree program is not the only way the business gives back. Symmetree Maine is a member of 1% for the Planet, which longtime friends Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia and Craig Mathews of Blue Ribbon Flies created in 2002 after a fishing trip. The organization reports it has since certified more than $870 million in donations to environmental causes. Membership means committing a share of sales to that work, year in and year out.
Photo Courtesy Symmetree Base Camp
Inside the Camden store, the ethos extends well past the apparel racks. Trone describes the shop as “provisions for the conscious explorer,” and, alongside Symmetree’s own products, she stocks ethically sourced goods from other small companies, including recycled-plastic hammocks and blankets, as well as environmental books. “They represent the active hope that comes from supporting aware and kind people from around the world, as we love and care for our fragile planet,” the company described these partners. The back of the store has been converted into a meditation studio open to the public, a reflection of Trone’s own path; she earned a master’s degree in mindfulness studies at age 57. It offers a space to “connect with ourselves in this beautiful space,” the company describes, “in the present moment, with ease and compassion.”
The entire Maine collection evokes imagery of the state, featuring animals like puffins, lobsters, and seals, and wording like “Maine Summer Roadtrip” or “Maine: Where The Mountains Meet The Sea.” A Buoy T-Shirt “celebrates the iconic lobster buoys found along the coast,” while a Moose T-Shirt lets customers “show your love of Maine’s great wildlife – and great adventure.” A Lighthouse T-Shirt allows customers to show “your appreciation for Maine’s charming lighthouses,” an Old Maine Flag Trucker Hat with the state logo on the front lets you “flaunt your Maine pride.”
Photo Courtesy Symmetree Base Camp
Symmetree reflects a pattern showing up across American retail, where a growing number of independent brands are tying product sales directly to measurable environmental giving rather than treating sustainability as a marketing line. The model is straightforward enough that a two-person shop can run it: pick a credible partner, attach the giving to each sale, and let customers see exactly what their purchase does.
For Trone, the appeal is less about the mechanics than about the place. The store has given her a way to fold her family’s work, her own interests, and her long roots in the town into a single storefront. The trees, planted a world away, are the quiet result of a family doing business the way it believes in.
Photo Courtesy Symmetree Base Camp
