When the pandemic boom grew Mountain Hardwear’s revenue by 33% in 2021, its leadership opted to invest in a brand relaunch that would both celebrate its 30-year heritage and reposition it for the contemporary outdoor market.
Those efforts have paid off. Contrary to every other brand in parent company Columbia Sportswear’s portfolio, not to mention many others that have struggled post-COVID, Richmond, California-based Mountain Hardwear’s revenue grew nearly 7% year-over-year in 2024 to $108 million.
“What a lot of this brand design, marketplace ethos and business strategy was about is really quadrupling down on who we are and who we should be, because there’s not a lot of that happening amongst our competitors, big and small, right?” said President & Global GM Troy Sicotte who took over the job in June 2021 after serving as its VP of sales for three years.
Looking back and seeing the rewards from bucking the trend on what some of its competitors are doing is a testament that the strategy has worked, he said.
“It just feels really good that it wasn’t a fluke,” Sicotte said. “The strategy is sound. Consumers are responding, and as a result, retailers are seeing the opportunity. It’s been really exciting.”
Sunlight Sports owner Wes Allen said he had stopped carrying Mountain Hardwear products six or seven years ago at his store in Cody, Wyoming, partly because they were part of a publicly traded company and he wanted to see for himself how the brand showed up in the marketplace. He credited Sicotte and his predecessor, Joe Vernachio (now the CEO at Allbirds), with reinvigorating the brand’s relationship with specialty retailers such as Sunlight and refreshing its brand identity.
“Hardwear has done a great job recently of being a brand that is a little bit more modern and appeals to some of the younger customers in the outdoor market, but they’ve got a heritage too,” Allen told SESO. It’s fun, modern, and accessible, while also providing what’s required to recreate outdoors, he said. And that appeals to the wide spectrum of customers that come to Sunlight.
“Their vibe comes across as approachable, but also if you want to go deep and be a real outdoor nerd and climb a peak, you absolutely can with Hardwear.”
Allen selected Mountain Hardwear to be its brand partner for its 2025 summer campaign, and will showcase its popular sun-protective and trail gear in co-branded content that will start rolling out on social channels this spring when Yellowstone opens.
More Sun Days is a campaign that will roll out on social media channels this spring. Video courtesy of Sunlight Sports.
Mountain Hardwear is planning to do about 15 other co-branded marketing campaigns with retailers in 2025, Sicotte said.
Mountain Hardwear’s Winning Strategy
With no owned stores and no plans to open any, wholesale comprises most domestic sales for Mountain Hardwear, and ecommerce represents between one-fifth to a quarter of U.S. revenue, Sicotte said. The brand works hard to foster strong relationships with its partners, and specialty retailers have been crucial to that strategy.
According to Allen, the brand communicates its plans effectively to its retailers, and most importantly, it also listens to their feedback on those plans.
“They had the opportunity to make some moves in the market with products that would not have been healthy for their specialty partners, and they chose not to make those. And then they talked to us about why they did,” Allen said. There have also been instances when they’ve had to move quickly to change the price of a product, or something didn’t go as planned, or they had too much inventory, he said.
“First of all, they talked to us before it happened,” Allen said. “Secondly, they made sure that we could still be profitable with the brand. There were no surprises.”
“We want relationships that are long-term and durable and meaningful and, of course, profitable,” Sicotte said. “You know, if a retailer partner is not profitable with us, my ego is not so big to think that they need us.”
Sicotte said historically he and his colleagues have joked about the “sea of sameness” in the outdoor industry. The brand doesn’t target a specific demographic but instead aims to create a unique persona that invites the next generation of consumer, who could be young or just someone who takes a progressive approach to how they shop and what they wear.
Photo courtesy of Mountain Hardwear.
Mountain Hardwear’s team is currently working on defining what that persona is, but he said one of the best ways to understand it is to look at its athlete team.
“They’re not just crushers in their sport. They have to be more than that,” he said, referring to people like trail runner and musician Liz Derstine, or climber, broadcaster, and author Tim Emmett.
“Are they a chef? Are they a musician? Are they passionate about something or want to help with diversity in our industry? Do they represent a change in the sport? You can’t just be a four-point student getting into the best school. They want to see something else outside of that, that extracurricular thing outside of the sport,” Sicotte said.
Those elements go beyond the rational, technical approaches to the sport that so many other brands do well, Sicotte said, and get at the more cultural elements and being a human.
Sicotte aims to bring that same approach to showcasing what happens behind the scenes at Mountain Hardwear, which now has approximately 85 employees.
“We’re doing cool things here and we have cool people working on it, and we’re just one big family,” he said.
Growth to Accelerate Amidst Tariffs and Public Lands Threats
There are benefits to being part of a publicly held company such as Columbia, Sicotte said.
Columbia President and CEO Tim Boyle said that after seeing positive responses to Mountain Hardwear’s new snowsports offerings, its expanded Ghost Whisperer collection, and its collaboration with Stüssy, he’s confident with its product line and refreshed positioning to further elevate the brand in the marketplace and attract new consumers.
“We’re investing in the brand,” Boyle said in the company’s fourth-quarter and full year earnings call earlier this year. “This includes demand creation investments to supercharge its ecommerce business as well as partnering with outdoor retailers to elevate in store presentations. I believe these investments will lay the foundation for growth acceleration in the years ahead.”
Photo courtesy of Mountain Hardwear.
“I always joke that the parents now see that opportunity and want to help us,” Sicotte said. “Our bedroom’s clean, our house is in order, our grades are good, and so now they’re going to help us get there a little bit faster than we could organically.”
Sicotte said he aims to grow both wholesale and DTC at a similar rate and leverage the digital ecosystem with tools such as Locally to drive traffic to local retailers.
Another benefit to being part of Columbia is its sophisticated understanding of tariffs and how to mitigate their impact on the business, which Boyle has repeatedly warned will likely drive up prices. Tariff threats go beyond price increases, however, and could impact both domestic and international sales.
Consumer and retailer confidence could be affected by evolving trade policy, its impact on the stock market, and the growing concerns about a recession. The trade war with Canada could hurt sales there, too, where Mountain Hardwear’s business has been strong, Sicotte said. Recently a Canadian customer responded to an SMS marketing message, signaling a shift in consumer sentiment there.
“They said, ‘I love you guys, but I’m just boycotting American brands right now,’” Sicotte said. “And I get it. We get it.”
And recent public lands job cuts by the Trump administration, with the threat of more layoffs to come, will take a toll on the maintenance of trails.
Both Allen and Sicotte said the news generated by those cuts could impact participation numbers, which have been higher than ever since the pandemic.
“Let’s set aside the efficacy of what the administration might be doing. Let’s set aside any change in direction they might announce later,” Allen of Sunlight Sports said. “There’s been so much publicity about the impact on public land and the moves that the administration is making, there’s going to be a non-zero effect on the number of people who decide they want to come here. And that’s going to be the case with all public lands.”
Sicotte is on the board at Outdoor Industry Association, and he said its upcoming Capitol Summit in April will likely be its biggest and possibly its most important ever.
“We have to make sure that our industry is heard on how some of these things are going to impact us and the places where we play,” he said.
Kate Robertson can be reached at kate@shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com.
