Recent trends in the Outdoor category

Pertex have been a category leading producer of performance fabrics since the company’s registration in 1979. In 2021 Pertex commissioned us to provide a comprehensive re-branding and re-positioning. Our design work encompassed: logotype, symbol and typographic system, brand colours and sub-brand identities, the re-definition of photographic and video approaches, brand voice and messaging, and a roll-out from hang-tags to printed sales materials and website. A strategic piece provided the footing for design. The details of that work are commercially sensitive. However, it was based on findings and insights arising from an initial survey of the current condition of the Outdoor category – its norms, trends and opportunities, the results of which we share below.

Cultural context: digital saturation

A major cultural shift post-Covid has been an intensification of a deep-seated need for non-digital experience. The digital fragments, flattens, atomises, and socialises anti-socially through comparison and competition. Digitally mediated experience is brittle and distracted, tending to fuse what were once separate domains, work and leisure, most notably. The digital saturation of day-to-day experience has generated a powerful counter-demand for the unmediated and concrete, for authentic intimacy, and sustained, immersed, even intensely physical, forms of off-line experience.

Against this background, Outdoor has gained renewed cultural relevance across several fronts. Fundamentally new practices and meanings have arisen. In the process, the category has become transformed.

Category trends

Narrative turn

Desire for the authentic and concrete is profoundly altering how audiences engage in traditional Outdoor activities. Boundaries separating disciplines are becoming porous, as the activities become increasingly informal. Rock climbing, bouldering, alpinism, mountain climbing, hiking, trekking, camping, trail running, fell running, marathon running, Park Run running, jogging, commuting, bikepacking, gravel riding, road racing, track cycling, lying in fields – are coming to be seen less as exclusive disciplines, more as various forms of expression available for adoption and exploration. They are materials for creative self-expression, and how they might be engaged in – separated, combined, socialised and narrated – is radically open.

At the level of product, such an altered concept of outdoor activity is mirrored by altered needs in relation to the kit supporting it. The traditional use of apparel as purely functional equipment has extended towards expression. This extended, expressive function of the functional is to aid in a performance of authentic experience. The characteristics of such enlarged uses are narrative, even when they are also technical.

Fragmentation

Outdoor’s narrative turn places brands in a qualitatively new role in relation to end-users. Instead of brusquely supplying tools to support demanding physical tasks, brands are now required to facilitate their audiences’ creative and expressive projects to carve out a space of authentic meaning. Nature is the neutral, supposedly non-cultural, platform on which such projects are enacted. The tools to support these narrative tasks are themselves narrative.

These new audience requirements have shaken the established order of brands. Broad in their appeal, too large to offer an emotionally compelling centre for brand community, historically dominant brands offer insufficient story-telling functionality now sought by end-users. For your typical club runner-soft hiker-boulderer-gravel rider-bike packer, Hoka is more “functional” than Nike. Hoka’s scale and product specialism, the texture of its presentation, the brand’s culture, offers more self-narrational possibilities than Nike’s relatively flat, inevitably catchall expressions. Under pressure of the narrative demand, Outdoor has splintered into a multiplicity of story-telling positions. Independent, challenger brands proliferate, whilst behemoth brands lose share at the progressive end of the market, and struggle to contain the loss.

Mainstreaming

As established players relinquish share to independent challenger brands, category composition is rendered complex. The tendency towards focus and specialisation creates diversification across the category as brands lean into finely differentiated end-user preferences and narrative requirements. Yet, in a seemingly contradictory process, nichification has been accompanied by the opening of Outdoor towards broader, mainstream markets. We saw the beginning of this trend some time ago in the Gorpcore phenomenon, the appropriation of functional apparel by fashion audiences.  

Initially, it was Outdoor category brands’ brutal prioritisation of functional considerations that promised authenticity for fashion audiences, at once transfixed and appalled by the excessive expressions of luxury brands. This provided a tension between brutality and luxury, obvious in the standardised collab formula:  Outdoor X Luxury. But, for all the subversive hierarchy teasing, The North Face X Gucci turned out to be Gucci, passed through a hype generator. All too knowing to be of use if authenticity was what was needed.  

In the second moment, as progressive Outdoor brands begin to hone their narrative expressions, it is a more concrete form of authenticity – a clarity and authenticity of brand intention – that now provides the counterpoint to luxury. It is precisely the specificity, the narrowness and intensity of intention, its concreteness that now serves (in abstraction) as the counterpoint to luxury. And this can be accessed directly by fashion audiences, without the mediating presence of luxury brands.

Uneven development

Many brands have responded to changing category conditions, adjusting their brand expressions to align with shifting end-user needs; others have not. Consequently, the transformation of the Outdoor category is unfolding as a process of uneven development. While this varied response holds, the opportunity for differential advantage is greatest. When end-user expectation eventually forces a category wide shift, quality of brand expression will become the decisive differentiator.  In the meantime, the category presents a schizoid state. Old-school performance focused brands continue to behave, as they have always done, as if end-user needs revolve exclusively around the efficient performance of practical tasks. At the same time, independent brands have grasped that Outdoor is actually inside end-users’ heads. At their most extreme we find brand expressions derived from the psychedelic plasticity of reality deformed by endurance activity, a trend informing recent District Vision (running apparel) or Pas Normal (cycling apparel) campaigns. This is an exciting moment of transition in which conventional category norms are asserted, albeit with weakened authority, just as alternative, more compellingly relevant forms are proposed.

Outliers – "ingredient brands"

One segment showing little sign of responding to the shifting category landscape is that of the so-called ‘ingredient brands’, suppliers of technical fabrics, down fillings, coatings and fastenings to their apparel manufacturing customers. Since the emergence of the category in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these brands have tracked their customers’ mode of expression, albeit in a more subdued register. But whereas Outdoor as whole now finds itself in a turmoil of contested standards of  expression, ingredient brands uniformly adhere to their traditional modes of address. Across the board, brand expression in this segment conforms to a historic B-2-B register: generic, uninformative and unimaginative visual identities, technical-performance focused narratives tending to converge at a point of indifference, delivered in visual and written language entirely constrained by category convention and cliché.

Historically, this was unproblematic. The audience addressed by ingredient brands consisted in a small number of industry specialists. Product engineers and specifiers used technical information to inform their selection of materials. Marketing managers relayed a portion of it to performance focused end-users. There was no need for ingredient brands to address end-users directly. However, the end-user shift towards narrativity places this group in a new relation to apparel ‘ingredients’ and associated brands.

The verb ‘curate’ is a useful way to frame an end-user consideration process of characterised by deliberate, highly informed selection directed towards the expressive combination of otherwise separate cultural items. In the simplest form of this consumer practice, products are creatively articulated in their relation to each other: Snowpeak titanium mug | Helinox stool | Bedrock sandals | Goldwin shorts | etc. | etc. However, in its extended from, end-users grasp products as systems that are themselves compositionally ‘curated’. The fabric of a shell jacket, say, is a system of yarns, membranes and coatings combined for specific use benefits. This understanding of product construction is deployed within the end-user narrative process, a fabric product’s breathability, say, becoming a narrative component. Other components include the ingredient brands’ heritage, ethos, sustainability commitments, technical specialisms. Between ‘ingredient brands’ and apparel producers, the requirements necessary to meet end-user brand expression expectations are the same.

The fact that ingredient brands have remained within a now outdated mode of brand expression is unhelpful for their customers, particularly those whose own expressions have successfully adapted to shifting end-user expectation. Essentially, what apparel brands now need from their suppliers is narrative support in the form of product storytelling that can be used to building out and enhance their own brand narrative frameworks and message tracks.  

The category insights above formed the basis of a re-positioning and brand strategy for Pertex. Toggle back to our case study to see the visual translation of this initial strategic work.