A founder who left Polaris and started again in Thief River Falls.

Arctic Cat is an American brand of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, and English Wikipedia describes its machines as manufactured in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. The same article dates the company’s formation to 1960 and names its founder as Edgar Hetteen, who started it after leaving an earlier business he had begun himself: Polaris.

The story of that earlier business explains a good deal about the later one. English Wikipedia’s Polaris article says Edgar Hetteen, his brother Allan Hetteen and David Johnson were partners in a firm called Hetteen Hoist and Derrick in Roseau, Minnesota. In 1954, while Edgar was away on a business trip, Johnson and several employees built a prototype vehicle meant to travel over snow, so that hunting grounds could be reached more easily. The employees kept building snowmobiles, and a second model, led by Allan Hetteen, was called the Polaris Sno Traveler; the first production model came off the assembly line in Minnesota in 1956. According to the same article, Edgar was at first sceptical, but as the machines began to sell he became an advocate for them.

To promote the new snowmobile, the Polaris article says, Edgar led a three-snowmobile trek across the Alaskan wilderness in 1960, starting from Bethel, Alaska. The trip took three weeks, and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner put the riders on its front page. His absence, however, caused problems with the board of the Roseau bank. Soon after the trip, in June 1960, he left the company and started a competing business called Polar Manufacturing in Thief River Falls.

English Wikipedia’s Arctic Cat article says the company made its first snowmobile in 1960, and that the name Polar Manufacturing soon gave way to Arctic Enterprises. The firm went on to build both snowmobiles and, later, all-terrain vehicles, and the Thief River Falls connection has stayed at the centre of the brand ever since.

Winter wear, a Boss Cat, a bankruptcy and a new company called Arctco.

Arctic Enterprises did not make only machines. English Wikipedia says that in 1968 it opened a winter-wear factory in Rainy River, Ontario, and in 1970 it started the Boss Cat line.

The early 1980s brought a break in the story. English Wikipedia’s Arctic Cat article dates the company’s bankruptcy to 1982, while its Polaris article places it in the mid-1980s, amid declining industry sales, a recession and overproduction in a poor winter. Both articles agree on what followed: the name survived. The Arctic Cat article says that two years after the bankruptcy a new company, Arctco, was created to continue production of Arctic Cat snowmobiles, and in 1996 that company changed its own name to Arctic Cat, bringing the corporate name into line with the brand on the machines.

The same article notes that the headquarters has moved several times over the decades, but that most manufacturing, along with snowmobile engineering, has stayed in Thief River Falls. Engines are made at a second Minnesota site, in St. Cloud.

On 25 January 2017, English Wikipedia says, it was announced that Textron would acquire Arctic Cat in a cash transaction. In early 2019 the company announced that the Arctic Cat name would return to its side-by-sides and ATVs beginning with the 2020 model year.

English Wikipedia says Textron announced in December 2024 that manufacturing in Thief River Falls and St. Cloud would stop in the first half of 2025. On 24 April 2025, Arctic Cat announced that it had been acquired by Brad Darling, a former Arctic Cat executive and president of the vehicle maker Argo, together with an investment group that holds a stake in Argo. In May 2025, the company said it would continue building snowmobiles at both the Thief River Falls and St. Cloud plants.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make powersports machines: motorcycles, snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles, side-by-sides and personal watercraft. Some grew out of larger industrial groups and only later attached their names to leisure machines; others were set up from the start to build engines and the vehicles around them, and a few now build machines under more than one name.

A powersports brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single badge than by a set of habits: a livery colour repeated across a range, model names and number codes on side panels, decals that change from season to season, and race teams that put the same colours in front of a crowd. Because the company behind a name may have been sold, spun off from a larger group or folded into a new owner, the questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where its vehicles are actually built.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A northern Minnesota brand with a new owner and a new sled.

Since 2025 Arctic Cat has been back in independent hands, and the first acquisition under its new owners points to where the brand is heading. On 7 January 2026, English Wikipedia says, Arctic Cat announced that it had acquired Widescape, a company based in Québec, and would produce Widescape’s stand-up enduro snowmobiles.

Arctic Cat and Polaris both began in northern Minnesota, and the two companies share a founder in Edgar Hetteen, and the Polaris article’s account of his 1960 Alaska trek, followed within months by the start of Polar Manufacturing, links the early histories of both brands.

The names chosen over the years also tell a story. Polar Manufacturing became Arctic Enterprises; a product line called Boss Cat arrived in 1970; and the “Cat” eventually took over the whole company when Arctco renamed itself Arctic Cat in 1996. The machines carried the name first, and the corporation followed it.

For a design guide, Arctic Cat shows how a brand name can outlast its corporate shells — Polar Manufacturing, Arctic Enterprises, Arctco, a Textron division and now an independent company — while staying rooted in one small Minnesota town. Compare Polaris, the company Edgar Hetteen helped start in Roseau before leaving in 1960, and Ski-Doo, another snowmobile brand in this collection. For this guide we use spruce green, snowfield white and signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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