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Recently, Arc’teryx, an outdoor-apparel brand that’s been around for about 35 years, became the subject of a baffling social media trend. TikTok was flooded with videos of Gen Z users showering in Arc’teryx jackets. Many filmed themselves nodding to the beat of the song “Arc’teryx,” by British rapper YT, with the camera angled to capture the mesmerizing effect of water beading off $700 Gore-Tex ski shells. Others used the song as a backdrop for posts showing rain-drenched gear from rival outdoor-apparel brands alongside captions like “Fuck it, I’m buying Arc’teryx.”
It was both a sign of the brand’s luxe status and a rebuke of the means by which so many others chase that same status; a reminder that no logo or limited-edition collaboration is as cool as a product that does what it’s meant to do. The satisfyingly effective functionality of Arc’teryx is exactly what makes it cool—the sleek designs, enigmatic logo, and big-name celebrity endorsements from guys like Frank Ocean, David Letterman, and Drake, are secondary to the brand's outdoors bonafides. For all its outsider appeal, though, the spectacle of TikTok users showering in Arc’teryx would seem to tie the brand to a familiar consumer urge that has made gorpcore a multibillion-dollar industry: a desire to buy products engineered for lives so different from our own that we must invent rituals demonstrating how much abuse they can withstand.
This aura of elegant pragmatism has helped vault the brand to new heights. Sales last year, through the third quarter, rose by 65% over the same period a year earlier, according to Arc’teryx. With the brand seemingly red-hot, its parent company, the Chinese-owned Amer Sports—which owns a slew of other companies including Wilson and Salomon—went public a few weeks ago. Now, beholden to shareholders and the whims of the stock market, expectations may be even higher. No brand would be wise to count on TikTok virality to sustain consumer appetite. In order for Arc’teryx to keep sales roaring on its flagship Alpha and Beta Gore-Tex jackets, the brand will need its products to retain the quality that has always made them stand apart from competitors. This could be trickier now than it has ever been for the company.
Arc’teryx cofounder Dave Lane started out making rock climbing harnesses in Vancouver in 1989. Those harnesses soon inspired an Arc’teryx backpack, the first to use the thermo-molded foam-padded waist straps that are now an industry standard for easing back and shoulder strain on long hikes. In 1995, Lane left the company in the hands of business partners who spent the next few years experimenting with apparel made from a proprietary waterproof fabric called Gore-Tex. The result was the Alpha SV, which debuted in 1998 and became an instant classic, despite a hefty $450 price tag reflecting the cost of its waterproof materials and the narrow market of alpine climbers and skiers the jacket was engineered to impress.
By that time, the North Face and Patagonia were already household names, having broken through to the masses in the late ’80s, when technical outdoor apparel went into large scale production. In the 1990s, those brands became pioneers in marketing niche outdoor interests to lifestyle consumers—it soon became as common to see a Patagonia fleece on a college campus, or a North Face jacket on the D train, as it was to see either on the slopes. The North Face, in particular, discovered a large untapped market for its high-altitude gear in New York, where street cred via graffiti writers, skateboarders, and rappers raised the brand’s profile—a cameo in an early Wu Tang video helped take the trend nationwide. But it would prove to be precarious territory for a brand whose coolness depends on its credibility as an extreme-sports outfitter. By 2000, the North Face—“outerwear maker to the hip-hop and hiker nations,” as the New York Post called it—found itself on the verge of bankruptcy, evidence that fashion-driven hype cycles and wild swings in popularity may not be the only things worth chasing. That year the apparel conglomerate VF Corporation saved the North Face by assuming $130 million in debt and making a further $25.4 million in stock purchases to acquire it.
Meanwhile something else was happening in the outdoor-apparel market: It was splintering into two camps. As the acquisition of the North Face demonstrated, some brands chased the lifestyle side of the market with increasingly affordable and accessible versions of products once meant for extreme-weather conditions. Other brands doubled down on making garments too technical, and too expensive, for the mainstream. Arc’teryx remained firmly in that later group through the aughts. And yet, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the sudden ubiquity of the North Face and Patagonia fed a tributary market for customers interested in the status that came with buying into the outdoor-clothing trend at its loftiest price point; in time, the widening gap between lifestyle and technical outdoor-apparel would become its own kind of status marker.
Crucially, the Alpha SV first became a hit with its intended market: ice climbers. Skiers. Alpinists. Then it caught on with decidedly less hard-core nature lovers, and with hipsters and young professionals in the soggy cities of the Pacific Northwest. The brand’s cryptic logo—a stylized fossil of the avian dinosaur Archaeopteryx—first grabbed my attention at a heavy metal concert in Portland, Oregon, where I saw a bike messenger wearing one of its rain shells while watching the band High on Fire perform in 2005. That was just the beginning.
In the years since, technical apparel has only become further entrenched in the collective fashion consciousness. Naturally, Arc’teryx has been positioned to lead this movement, and in recent years became the ultimate aspirational brand of the gorpcore wave, which turned hikers’ go-to trail snack “good old raisins and peanuts” into a buzzy fashion trend. Willingly or not, the company has found itself in a position similar to that of the North Face at the end of the ‘90s: in demand for its elite reputation, while also tempted to reach beyond the cliffs of the Canadian Rockies to unlock new market potential. Arc’teryx has already made some changes to its business in an effort to grow and sustain in the face of trend winds, but now, with shareholder interests to account for and a seemingly insatiable appetite for gorpcore, the brand may be approaching its most perilous peak.
It was early November when I traveled to Vancouver to investigate the “Fuck it, I’m buying Arc’teryx” factor that has allowed the brand to weather a gorpcore bonanza with its reputation for excellence intact. The confidential paperwork for Amer’s initial public offering had been filed just weeks before my visit. It was a fortuitous time for me to take a peek behind the curtain at the Arc’teryx headquarters.
Karl Aaker, Arc’teryx’s vice president of brand marketing, is a former college basketball player, with a stature that causes him to stand out among a workforce that tends toward the diminutive, wiry build that suggests long hours at the rock climbing gym and weekends spent hanging from the side of a mountain. He took on his current role at the company in early 2021, after its new owners went on a hiring spree that privileged executive experience at Lululemon, Adidas, and Nike, where Aaker worked for five years. The shower TikTok videos, not exactly a scientific indicator of success, started early on in Aaker’s tenure, he told me, and took everyone at Arc’teryx by surprise, like a compliment so odd that it provokes self-reflection and self-consciousness.
“While we don’t design it for the shower,” Aaker said of the Alpha’s star turn on TikTok, “it can keep you dry in there.”
Soon after Aaker started, he and his colleagues embarked on a somewhat counterintuitive growth strategy. In order to scale up the company, Aaker told me, they opted to first strip it down. In its third decade, the Arc’teryx product line had swelled to include superfluous offerings that prioritized form over function—upscale outdoor clothing engineered to handle anything, but made for nothing in particular.
“By nature of just lots of changes in ownership and changes in the market, we’d gotten pretty broad on what we were trying to do,” Aaker said. “We were going after lots of different product categories.”
With support from its new owners, Arc’teryx leadership sought to anchor the brand to its legacy by discontinuing any garments indulging what Aaker called “generic versatility.” Growing the brand would be necessary in the wake of a planned IPO, but diluting its essence in the process could be avoided, Aaker hoped, by paring down the product line while expanding the number of Arc’teryx stores showcasing whatever survived the purge. In the years since, its retail presence has grown by dozens of stores and will soon number some 200 outlets, according to an Arc’teryx spokesperson. Many of these new outlets are located in China, where Arc’teryx’s new parent company’s owners are betting on the brand’s prospects with an increasingly prosperous middle class.
Arc’teryx was fashionable almost from the moment the original Alpha SV hit the market. One early fan was Paul Mittleman, a longtime creative director at Stüssy, who put Arc’teryx in the streetwear spotlight by dressing the professional skateboarder Harold Hunter in a blue Alpha jacket for a Fader magazine photo shoot in 1998. “It was really one of the first times that we featured outerwear and technical apparel in an urban setting, in a street-culture context, or even a streetwear context,” said photographer Reggie Casagrande. Hunter, who died in 2006, “was just really into it,” Casagrande told me, and said the Alpha jacket was definitely something he would wear—something he felt good in.
Casagrande’s now iconic photograph highlights a range of technical features, from bright blue fabric meant to stand out to mountaintop search and rescue personnel to seam-taped zippers and a storm hood that made it both more waterproof and far sleeker than other Gore-Tex jackets. What made it something a professional skateboarder might “feel good in,” though, was its radical use of 3D patterning. Last November, during my visit to a sprawling studio on the second floor of the Arc’teryx Design Center, the company’s chief creative officer, Katie Becker, explained the innovation while showing me an original Alpha SV jacket she’d plucked from the brand archives—like all Arc’teryx garments, it tends to drape inelegantly from a hanger because of the way it is contoured for an anatomical fit that is especially important with a relatively inelastic fabric like Gore-Tex.
“Even when you have a static material that doesn’t stretch, the product moves with you anyways,” Becker told me. “This wasn’t built flat.”
It was a cloudy morning and Becker was showing me around the labyrinthine complex where every Arc’teryx product is dreamed up, prototyped, and tested. The brand occupies several buildings that sit on the north shore of Vancouver. Among them is the design center, a large, two-story glass building. The place is an enormous playground for creators, one of whom was inspecting prototypes for a new branded paper shopping bag when I arrived. (The business center, located in a different building down the road, is where someone had crunched the numbers to determine that the intricate embossing on those prototype shopping bags made them too expensive for mass production.)
Becker spent 12 years as a senior design director at Adidas before joining Arc’teryx in early 2020. One of her first priorities was to reconsider the wholesale strategy that the brand had been relying on for years, which made outlets like REI the first place most consumers saw Arc’teryx gear—often alongside clothing made by less premium outdoor brands. Becker shifted a significant chunk of the business toward a direct-to-consumer model built around branded stores throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. This strategy was not only about capturing more sales revenue, she told me, but also about making sure other companies were no longer in a position to influence the Arc’teryx product line.
“We used to be very wholesale led, so it would be, like, ‘Oh, we want a Beta jacket, but cheaper and cheaper,’” Becker said, echoing the demands of the company’s retailers. “And maybe we want a skirt. Or a plaid shirt. And it’s like: No. What’s the brand stand for? It’s the most pinnacle product. It’s disruption. It’s innovation. Let’s get back to that.”
This repositioning of its garments as peerless and refined is, if not a reset, a kind of realignment with the sort of thinking that spawned Veilance, a luxury-fashion line established in 2009 as an upscale urban expression of the Arc’teryx brand. Later on in my visit, when I met Veilance brand manager Heidi Turner, several minutes passed before I realized she was dressed head to toe in the label, which eschews logos and uses more polished materials to produce garments that evoke a gorpcore take on The Row. Veilance pieces are manufactured elsewhere—some at a north Vancouver facility called ARC’One—but the concepts are worked out and prototyped in the far corner of a massive studio on the second floor of the Arc’teryx Design Center.
Just beyond the Veilance workshop, amid dozens of desks, drafting tables, and sewing stations, long rows of wall-mounted racks served as a temporary home for enough apparel to fill a bus. Among the prototypes, samples, and store-ready clothing was a great gathering of camouflage LEAF jackets and cargo pants hung far out of reach, near the ceiling, like a rich vein of gold running along the side of a granite cliff face. The roots of the the LEAF program date back to the late ‘90s, to a competition held by the US military: Arc’teryx designers made a military grade rucksack with an internal frame that proved so impressive that the Marines ordered 1,000 of them, giving the company its biggest sale prior to the launch of the Alpha SV. Eventually, the brand would sell 200,000 of the rucksacks, while informally taking orders for tactical clothing and climbing gear that was more durable than its retail line and tailored to the color specifications of various military units and search and rescue teams.
In 2005, the LEAF line was formally launched as both a profitable side business and a kind of laboratory for pushing Arc’teryx products to new extremes of engineering and durability. Executives at the company declined to say how much money LEAF generates, or which militaries and police forces it works with, but a search of public federal-procurement contracts show US government purchase orders indicating a broad range of LEAF grails waiting to be copped: Arc’teryx safety and rescue equipment for the Environmental Protection Agency, and outerwear for the National Park Service; “special purpose” apparel for the US Drug Enforcement Agency; and a broad range of clothing and equipment made for the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. (The most tantalizing LEAF order I came across was for $24,982.45 worth of “individual equipment” procured for Naval Special Warfare Group Two by US Special Operations Command.)
Opposite the wall of LEAF gear, in the advanced-concepts department, Becker invited me to peruse racks of clothing that looked increasingly out of sync with present-day fashion trends. Extremely low-profile puffer coats hung alongside rain shells and base layers made from fabrics with strange and unfamiliar textures. “That’s future future,” Becker told me. “2026 and beyond.” Not far away, a large table was piled high with curiously light backpacks made from an opaque white material that felt like it was neither plastic nor cloth but similar to both. The designer in charge of the project told me it was a “mono material” that is bonded to itself using heat and pressure, which means it can be shaped into products with minimal stitching and no glue. In theory, recycling products made with the material could be as simple as shredding and reshaping it into something new.
What really surprised me, though, was Arc’teryx’s more immediate future, which I glimpsed in a pile of shoes Becker had arranged on a table just beyond the advanced-concepts department. In particular, I was taken aback by the sheer number of silhouettes slated to launch throughout the next year or so. Footwear is the newest product category for Arc’teryx, which released its first hiking and trail running shoes in 2015. This turned out to be fortuitous timing, as consumers have since proved more willing than ever to look beyond Nike and Adidas toward brands like Hoka, On, and Salomon. To capture more of that increasingly wide-open market, Becker told me, Arc’teryx was broadening its sneaker line to include an ultralight trail running shoe, a wider selection of Gore-Tex hiking shoes and boots, and a performance sneaker with a stretchy ankle collar for keeping out debris. Seeing the entire line spread out across a table prompted me to ask whether Arc’teryx might be thinking bigger than its direct competition in the outdoor-apparel industry.
“Nike and Adidas, they don’t own it all anymore,” Becker told me.
The comment struck me as exceptionally bold, especially from an Adidas veteran. To make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding the brand’s ambitions, I exchanged emails with Ovi Garcia, who worked at Nike for 15 years before joining Arc’teryx as vice president of footwear in 2021. He was unambiguous when asked about what he wanted to achieve with the company.
“Our goal is to become a pinnacle footwear brand, to be known for our footwear the same way we are for our hard shells,” Garcia told me. “Over the last two years, we’ve tightened our focus, looking at why we exist in the world, and now we’ve put resources against it, with a dedicated team, and a footwear office in Portland.”
These grand ambitions have helped Arc’teryx climb to new heights. What remained to be seen, however, is how the brand might continue to grow without sliding back toward generic versatility—or, rather, how it might avoid being pushed back in that direction by the shareholders who were about to become part of the brand’s future.
When I visited an Arc’teryx store in Tokyo, in early February, the staccato buzz of consumer activity went a long way toward explaining how Japan had become the brand’s fastest-growing market in 2023. It also clarified something I sensed while visiting the brand’s stores in Vancouver, Portland, and Los Angeles, which is that every Arc’teryx location has its own rhythm, clientele, and unique center of gravity.
While visiting the flagship store in Vancouver, it was a small laundromat that first caught my eye. Situated in the corner of an otherwise upscale boutique, the row of washing machines were there for anyone who wanted a lesson in properly washing Gore-Tex garments. Dominique Showers, the vice president of Arc’teryx’s care, repair, and upcycling program, called ReBird, told me it was part of an effort to encourage people to extend the life of their Arc’teryx gear. “With Gore-Tex, over time, the contaminants of your skin, your oils, sweat, etcetera, and even your hair, that will start to affect the performance of the jacket,” Showers told me. “So we try to encourage ongoing washing.”
In my interview with Aaker, he’d mentioned a “community-first mentality” that prevailed when designing Arc’teryx retail spaces. At the Vancouver store, other examples of this included a small library of books and magazines on rock climbing and mountaineering, and large tables modeled after the workstations where designers create each Arc’teryx garment. “We sell a lot of jackets and they all look the same,” one staffer told me. “It’s a really nice space to lay things down, turn a jacket inside out, and have a good look.”
Turning a few jackets inside out revealed some individually numbered limited editions that had been made in batches of just a few hundred pieces from scraps of leftover Gore-Tex fabric that had piled up at the ARC’One manufacturing facility. These semi-bespoke pieces, which could also be found in Los Angeles and Tokyo, had been inspired by the two-tone test jackets Arc’teryx has long made for its sponsored athletes: By making the left side of the garment from one fabric, and the right from another, they could test two different materials at the same time. Some of the mismatched fabrics looked especially good together, and what started as a way to save money became a fashion statement among Arc’teryx athletes and staffers. Showers told me they’ve been popular enough to save tons of excess fabric from the landfill.
This ability to attract new customers is more important than ever since February 1, when Amer Sports raised less than expected—$1.37 billion—in its first day of trading on Wall Street. Arc’teryx CEO Stuart Haselden recently told me that cash “will open new sources of capital that can be used to accelerate our strategy for sustained growth,” which, he said, has already been incredible across North America and China. For me, though, it was on the streets of Tokyo where I first sensed that Arc’teryx might be ready to go global.
From the moment I landed, it was obvious that the brand had gained a foothold in the year or so since my last visit there. I chalked it up to bias at first—I was writing a story about Arc’teryx, after all, so naturally I was primed to spot the brand everywhere. But in the week that followed, every social gathering I went to included at least one person with a new Arc’teryx jacket, backpack, or carryall. Not a day passed without me seeing its products on the streets, sometimes in greater abundance than much bigger rivals. Eventually, I started asking every person I saw in Arc’teryx why they had chosen the brand. The answer was almost always the same:
“It’s cool.”
