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Arc’teryx was founded as a harness brand. Thirty-five years later, its product is still as technical as could be. In fact, since CEO Stuart Haselden joined in 2021, the brand has doubled down on its founding focus, zeroing in on its outdoor roots.
But the fashion crowd has caught on, and the hyper-technical gorpcore trend, plus celebrity endorsements (Frank Ocean and Drake are fans, and the late Virgil Abloh put Arc’teryx on the runway for Off-White’s Autumn/Winter 2020 collaboration), have solidified Arc’teryx as a cult icon. Can it maintain its cool?
The pressure is on. In February of this year, Amer Sports, which owns Arc’teryx (alongside sportswear brands including Salomon, Peak Performance and Wilson) went public. The IPO didn’t meet analyst expectations, and its opening stock price was discounted to $13 per share, down from $16 to $18 as planned. But Arc’teryx has been a bright spot. When Amer reported its second-quarter results in August, CEO James Zheng called out the brand as “a breakout growth story with unprecedented growth”. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) revenues were up 40 per cent to $449 million and wholesale grew 2 per cent to $545 million.
Celebrities and streetwear fanatics alike first cottoned onto the brand’s Beta LT shell jacket, most commonly worn in neutrals like black and navy (though Virgil was papped in the cobalt blue). Now, though, you’ll see an array of Arc’teryx shells on the streets of Shanghai and dinosaur fossil-logoed beanies atop New Yorkers’ heads from Midtown to SoHo. Still, Arc’teryx gear isn’t designed for the fashion insider or the city dweller — and that’s not about to change. Haselden is confident that the brand can continue to capture these consumers without directly catering to them. It’s the brand’s re-commitment to its mountain roots that he believes is endearing to those operating at lower altitudes in the first place.
“There’s an inherent appeal in having the best of anything,” Haselden says from the brand’s North Vancouver HQ. “We believe that the construction, the fabrication, the designs that we create are — technically — the very best.” Plus, it looks good (especially if you’re into gorpcore). “Arc’teryx is equal parts technical performance paired with elegant simplicity.”
Now, Arc’teryx is focused on growing with a tight technical focus, building on its DTC strategy that Haselden introduced when he joined the company (he’s previously held positions at J Crew, Lululemon and Away). The brand may be 35 years old, but from a growth standpoint, Arc’teryx is in the early innings, he says.
Room to grow
As of now, Arc’teryx’s largest market is China, where there are more city-dweller fans than mountain athletes, Haselden says (the US consumer makeup, he notes, is the opposite). “What we learnt — and grew in conviction around — was that the appeal of the brand is that we are authentic and that we are designing for the mountain athlete and we only capture the brand fans because of our obsession and focus on designing performance products.”
This next stage is informed by these learnings, alongside lessons in what not to do. In 2021, per wholesalers’ recommendations, Arc’teryx was making far more than just technical gear, from dresses to checked shirts — cheaper, more generic products. “We were beginning to lose our way and the assortment had become quite overdone and lost focus,” says Haselden. “So we declared this mountain-athlete focus, put that at the centre of the brand and it created a really powerful filter that enabled us to edit out a lot of these products that were beginning to dilute the brand.”
Indeed, Arc’teryx has faced criticism for shifting focus from its core consumer: mountain athletes. By returning to this, Arc’teryx aims to win back its long-time outdoors consumer, plus reap the benefits of the wider fashion crowd’s affinity for the brand — by virtue of its very outdoorsiness.
Now, this is at the core of the brand’s expansion strategy. “The focus on these big urban centres is how we introduce the brand beyond just the niche sort of mountain-athlete community — but we can’t ever lose that,” Haselden says.
Direct to consumers
Arc’teryx has opened 33 new stores in 2024. “It’s kind of why I’m here,” Haselden says of this DTC double-down, or what he calls the “vertical reinvention of Arc’teryx”. He says he knows DTC far better than wholesale, especially informed by his nine years at J Crew.
Both 2021 and 2022 were about developing a retail expression for the brand; the past two years have been about refining the expression and opening more outposts. When Haselden joined, the brand had less than 20 retail stores in North America, with an average sales volume of $1.3 million. This year, North America’s now-60 stores will achieve close to a $3.5 million average volume. “There’s still a lot of runway to improve those numbers,” the CEO says, noting that a 200 stores total is “an easy goal” (opening 14 to 15 stores per year). Beyond the US and Canada, the goal is to achieve similar in-store productivity across in Europe, Japan, wider APAC and Australia.
DTC isn’t a novel strategy for sportswear. It’s also not a guaranteed success. In recent years, Nike leaned too heavily on its DTC channels, and its revenues suffered the consequences. Now, it’s swinging back to a better wholesale balance. So why is Haselden confident this is the right strategy for Arc’teryx?
“We’re still relatively small. It’s not a case of a massive company trying to reinvent itself, where they’ve ceded some of their position in wholesale to create this DTC expression,” he says. “We’re inventing it closer to the beginning.” Arc’teryx’s brand awareness is relatively low, he adds, so DTC is the strategy to introduce the brand to consumers.
Upping innovation
At Arc’teryx, innovation takes time — in part because of its technical product. “More than half of our revenues are from outerwear, so we have to retain our leadership position in our world,” Haselden says. To do so, there’s lots of testing at the HQ, which is filled with machines for ease of product tweaking. The machines themselves are tweaked (or “frankensteined”, as staff say) too, by in-house engineers, to cater to the brand’s specific needs.
At the other end of the spectrum, Arc’teryx’s advanced concepts team focuses on research and development at the cutting edge of performance wear. “We give that advanced concepts team quite a broad mandate to explore a bunch of different directions related to the mountain athlete and mountain sports,” Haselden says.
One such area is the brand’s forthcoming Mo/Go trousers, which have been in development for six years. The trousers are AI-powered, and designed to relieve joint pain when hiking and running. They’ll be priced at $5,000 in 2025, or $4,500 for those who pre-order now. “There’s value in pushing the edges of innovation,” Haselden says. “Even if those don’t materialise into commercial successes, we’re taking something from it; we’re learning something that we are able to incorporate into our own products.” For every Mo/Go style, there are five or six that don’t wind up materialising into actual products.
Arc’teryx is also doubling down on footwear. Up until March of this year, Arc’teryx’s footwear was designed and developed by its sister brand Salomon. “We recognised that the potential we had was never going to be fully realised unless we really took ownership of this,” Haselden says. So for the last three years, the brand has been building out its team in Portland, leading up to March’s release. “This is the single largest economic opportunity in terms of product that the company has,” he says.
Like the clothes, the shoes are built for the mountains — trail, not road running. So they’re not directly in competition with Nike and Adidas rivals like Hoka and On. That said, Haselden is confident that brand fans will buy them for their city walks and runs regardless, just like the jackets. “It’ll serve you on the side of the mountain or if you’re making your way across Midtown.” Or Dimes Square.
Speaking of Salomon, the brand is known for its fashion tie-ups, having partnered with luxury labels from MM6 Maison Margiela to Comme des Garçons and Sandy Liang. Will Arc’teryx be taking a leaf out of its sister brand’s fashion collab playbook? It’s dabbled, with a 2020 Off-White runway link-up, followed by a Jil Sander outerwear collaboration. (Both shortly before the brand’s re-route.)
Haselden is careful in his response. Arc’teryx’s whole shtick, after all, is its return to its technical, outdoors roots. “We’ve been reluctant to do the standard industry convention, if you will, in terms of these types of collabs. We’re very careful, we’re very picky and it’s something we think about often and it’s something that we continue to explore,” Haselden says. “When we find the right one, we’ll let you know.”
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