The Pioneers Behind Every Yurt Tent, Bell Tent and Glamping Tent You’ve Ever Loved

With Marilyn Moss Rockefeller — co-founder of Moss Tent Works and the original pioneer of the modern glamping tent.

This year marks 14 years for me in the glamping industry. I started with $5,000, built a seven-figure business, and somewhere along the way became one of the largest sellers of bell tents across the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The foundations of that business were brutally ripped away from me — it’s a story I’ll share more fully when the time is right.

But rather than burn bridges, I began building again. And honestly? It’s been the most creatively alive I’ve felt in years. I started from scratch and that meant going back to the roots of it all. Like an artist returning to the drawing board, I found my way to Jeff Moss and his mother Marilyn, based in Maine — and rediscovered the true roots of modern glamping.
What I found stopped me in my tracks.
Marilyn Moss Rockefeller is 84 years old. She co-founded Moss Tent Works with her late husband Bill Moss — the man credited with inventing the world’s first pop-up tent in 1955 and later creating some of the most breathtaking sculptural tent forms ever made. Forms that, whether the industry acknowledges it or not, gave birth to every bell tent, yurt tent and glamping tent you see today.
I consider Marilyn the Yoda of the glamping world. Warm, wickedly sharp, and utterly without ego. She told me something that has stayed with me every day since: there is no single origin story in tent design. Every bell tent, every yurt tent, every glamping tent you’ve ever admired is an evolution of something that came before. Bill’s own patents acknowledged the designs that inspired him. That intellectual honesty — that willingness to say this is where I came from — says everything about the kind of designer, and the kind of man, he was.
She also spoke openly about what happened when tent manufacturing moved to China. Designs that had taken years of painstaking creative development were replicated almost overnight. It’s a reality the entire glamping industry knows — the factories producing yurt tents and bell tents at scale today are intimately familiar with Bill Moss’s work. His influence runs through the stitching of almost every glamping tent made in the last two decades, whether his name appears on the label or not.
In an industry still largely dominated by men, Marilyn built Moss Tent Works into a world-renowned brand over 50 years — never compromising on quality, never compromising on people. Her former staff are her friends to this day. That kind of legacy doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a philosophy I carry with me into everything I build at Blue Bohemian.
Here’s to the women who build things properly — and the ones who are building again.

THE MAN WHO SAW THE WORLD IN CURVES

Bill Moss Design — the 1978 Fleur de Lis. The sculptural ancestor of the modern bell tent and yurt tent.

Bill Moss didn’t set out to shape an industry. He set out to solve a problem — a heavy, smelly fishing tent that nobody wanted to carry. What came out the other side was a revolution.
His Pop Tent of 1955 was the world’s first self-supporting dome — lightweight, elegant, fast to pitch. But it was his later sculptural work that would prove most prophetic. The Stargazer. The Para Wing. The Shelter Shell. And most significantly for those of us in the glamping tent world — the 1978 Fleur de Lis.
The Fleur de Lis was created for a garden installation, not a campsite. Marilyn told me with a laugh that technically it wasn’t even a tent — “it was a sculpture.” And yet its DNA — the curved fabric panels, the tall central peak, the generous interior volume, the way it blurred the line between shelter and art — is visible in virtually every bell tent and yurt tent produced anywhere in the world today.
Bill’s innovations were protected by patents. But as Marilyn observed quietly: “Patents run out, and so the designs were copied by a lot of people.”
Read that sentence again. Let it land.

THE SHELTER SHELL: PROPHETIC IN EVERY LINE

The Shelter Shell by Moss Tent Works — water and fire resistant, unfoldable in minutes. Sound familiar?

The Shelter Shell was another Moss design that history has quietly absorbed without credit. A lightweight four-person structure — water resistant, fire resistant, unfoldable in minutes — it had what Marilyn described as a sensibility that structure meets sculpture.
Look at it. Then look at the glamping tent landscape today. The resemblance is not coincidental. It is a lineage.
When manufacturing moved to China, these forms travelled with it. Every factory in Zhejiang province that produces bell tents and yurt tents today knows this design vocabulary intimately. It is the water they swim in.

THERE IS NO SINGLE ORIGIN STORY

This is the part I really want you to sit with.
The bell tent form — the yurt tent shape — the glamping tent silhouette that has become the defining image of outdoor luxury — has no single inventor. It evolved from the Sibley military tent of 1856. It was reimagined by Bill Moss in the 1970s. It was refined by factories in China who had been studying tensile fabric structures for decades. It was popularised by a wave of glamping entrepreneurs in the 2010s.
No one person created it. No one company owns it. It is a shared language — the design vocabulary of an entire industry.
When I interviewed Marilyn for Glamping Business Americas last year, she said something that I think every person in this industry needs to hear: “I’m actually happy to see that Bill’s influence lasted in the tent world. It’s gratifying to see his influence endure.”
She said this without bitterness. Without litigation. Without trying to put a fence around a shape that the whole world had already fallen in love with.
That is what grace looks like.

WHAT MARILYN TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUILDING

Beyond the design history, what moved me most about Marilyn was how she led.
Moss Tent Works grew to over 160 employees under her stewardship — in a male-dominated industry where she was regularly underestimated. She showed up to trade shows in heels, set up the booth herself, and built a culture where people genuinely wanted to do their best work.
Fifty years later, those people are still her friends.
“Creativity matters. Integrity matters. Caring about people matters,” she told me at the end of our conversation. “And if your work can be both beautiful and useful — then you’re doing something right.”

I wrote that down. I stuck it on my wall. I read it every morning.

CLOSING NOTE

The glamping tent — the yurt tent, the bell tent, whatever name it travels under — belongs to everyone and no one. It is a form that has evolved over 170 years through the hands of military engineers, American sculptors, Chinese manufacturers and independent designers working in every corner of the world.
It cannot be owned. It can only be honoured.
There is no single origin story. There never was. And the designers and brands who pretend otherwise are not honouring this history — they are obscuring it.
At Blue Bohemian, we honour it by pushing it further. The Better Bell takes everything we know about what makes a great glamping tent and improves on it — more sides, integrated front and rear awnings, elevated arched windows, 100% cotton canvas. Designed for the way people actually live, gather and celebrate outdoors.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. We just make sure we know whose shoulders they are. Explore the Better Bell at bluebohemian.com

This article features excerpts from Pioneers & Progress: A Conversation with Marilyn Moss*, originally published in Glamping Business Americas Magazine, October 2025, pages 67–69. By Jessica Walsh. Republished with kind permission from publisher Steph Curtis-Raleigh. Read more at glampingshow.us*
All photo reproduced with photos with permission from the Moss Family Archives