The North Face Wants to Be "Cool." What Will It Use to Conquer Young People's Vanity? | Market Inventors

Having become the favorite of dads in the city, they naturally want the youth market too.

Jiao Tianyi is 25. He is working on a second master's degree in Barcelona and runs a clothing business on the side. He has been into streetwear since high school, when he could spend 3,000 to 5,000 yuan a month on clothes.

That stretch was also when he wore the most from The North Face (TNF), the American outdoor brand. His first buys, around 2010, were the shell jackets and down jackets TNF made with the streetwear label Supreme — partly because he already liked Supreme, and partly because some of the early collaboration designs struck him as "wild," like the "Metropolis" and "Cashew" pieces, which set off his urge to buy. He also had a hunch that "buying them to keep wouldn't be a loss — they'd probably go up in price later."

He points to his own buyers today as an example: the collaboration jackets are often classic styles TNF already made, but once they carry the Supreme logo they turn "cooler, more expensive," and that, he says, "is usually the most important standard [for buyers]. Practicality comes second. There's even a bit of vanity mixed in."

TNF's "Purple Label," designed and made in Japan, was another of the lines he knew best; a friend in Japan bought the pieces for him while he was in college. Back then, besides regularly reading fashion official accounts and forums, he — like plenty of young people who liked streetwear — was a fan of Shawn Yue and Edison Chen, and copied their outfits. Sellers would pick Purple Label pieces out of candid photos of the two stars or out of film stills and tag them "the same one Shawn Yue wore."

Looking back on what he liked then, he found the Purple Label designs understated, wearable and easy to care for: "even the jeans I wore every day were water- and wrinkle-resistant, which gave me a very relaxed feeling." Compared with "the crowd that buys Supreme, who might be unruly rappers," he pictures the people who buy Purple Label from him now as office workers in the city, people who notice details and "know better what they want."

As for the professional outdoor gear The North Face has always been good at, Jiao Tianyi says he has never bought a single piece. Like the buyers he describes, he cares more about "cool, expensive." Everything he has bought from this outdoor brand, he bought because it began moving into city life and tying itself to young people and trends.

A quick look at the more-than-50-year history of this outdoor brand, founded in 1966, shows a "from the outdoors to the city" line running through the whole company: at the start it served only serious outdoor athletes, but in the end it took the road of "turning a niche thing into mass demand."

After the founder, extreme-sports enthusiast Douglas Tompkins, sold the company in 1969, The North Face kept expanding, and in the late 1990s it was bought by VF Corporation, the veteran apparel company that today also owns Vans and Dickies.

The North Face's products became more like everyday commodities after that: the target customer grew blurrier, and it was once jokingly crowned the outdoor wear "only people who never leave Beijing's Fifth Ring Road would wear." On one hand, buyers of every age did show up, but they were beginners or people who asked little of their gear; on the other, the more demanding core users moved to more elite brands.

The British lifestyle magazine Dazed once described TNF this way: "For a lot of people, The North Face brings to mind warm pints in the English Midlands, Land Rovers and a faint drift of racism; on a grey Sunday it might be what your dad wears with his wellies to walk the dog, because it has the qualities dads want in clothes: practical, comfortable, and requiring no thought at all."

Becoming a brand "dads like" counts as a result of The North Face's early push into the city market, but the brand clearly isn't satisfied with that now.

Like other old, conventionally large companies, The North Face wants the youth market too, and why that matters is obvious. QDaily reported on the "younger-skewing" of every industry back in 2015, citing the China Consumer Trends Report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG): by 2020, China's consumer market would grow by half, and 65% of that growth would come from people born in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

Just as sneaker design has turned fashionable and fast-fashion brands have thrown themselves into e-commerce platforms and social media, The North Face's outdoor elements have worked their way into an urban story, and the brand has begun dealing with young people in fine-grained ways, pulling in more and more people like Jiao Tianyi.

Some of it has worked. Which is why Tim Bantle, the general manager over the lifestyle line, can sum it up by saying that The North Face treats "exploration" as a way of thinking that applies anywhere, not just as the sport itself.

Collaborating with streetwear brands and shops: subculture stories from the past become today's marketing

Working with streetwear brands and shops seems to make "turning cool" fast and efficient. The "TNF x Supreme" collaboration, familiar to people like Jiao Tianyi, is one of the most talked-about cases. It began in 2007 and continues today; for Supreme, a streetwear brand with no shortage of collaborators, the partnership with TNF is also one of its steadiest and longest-lived.

Another Tim — Tim Sedo, The North Face's global brand director — told QDaily that "this collaboration makes us proud." First, because "it has brought The North Face a new group of consumers and drawn a lot of eyeballs"; and second, because "Supreme is itself the most old-school streetwear brand in New York. It created a culture, and The North Face has done something similar."

Tim Sedo enjoys talking about America in the 1980s and '90s. Back then, as he sees it, The North Face was expensive and well made, so rappers wore it as a mark of wealth: members of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, for one, wore TNF jackets in a music video. Timberland, the footwear brand, and Carhartt, the workwear maker, went the same way. "It's not that we set out to be fashionable — fashion adapted to us," Sedo said, with some pride. "[Back then] if you walked down the street in The North Face, people would think, huh, this guy's come into money."

It's hard to say how many young people today buy The North Face because rappers in 1990s New York liked it. What's certain is that the Supreme collaboration dug that history back up and stamped The North Face with a fresh label: "trendy, cool." The products thereby became genuine streetwear, and then turned up again in the videos of today's hottest rappers.

TNF and Supreme usually work by redesigning TNF's classic old styles — cultural material from decades ago updated and put back to use. Take the Mountain Parkas the two made for fall/winter 2010 and spring/summer 2013: you can see the 1990s Gore-Tex mountain jacket in them, a style the official site labels "revolutionary, now iconic."

The Steep Tech jacket that Wu-Tang Clan members wore in the 1993 video for Method Man was also "revived" in TNF and Supreme's spring/summer 2016 collaboration; the German streetwear blog Highsnobiety called the hoodie's bright yellow and pale blue a "nostalgic color scheme" and "a tribute to '90s hip-hop style."

Besides big names like Supreme and Vans, its sibling under the same company, The North Face's collaborations have also seeped into smaller trend shops — Extra Butter, for instance, which started as a sneaker store in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Customers at a shop like this have far more specific tastes than a big brand's do, which lets The North Face drop its big-brand posture and make styles that are distinctive, even a little unexpected. The Nuptse jacket the two released in 2017 was covered with the color bars that used to mean "no signal" on low-resolution televisions decades ago; the product teaser on social media was an old TV flashing, in turn, "technical difficulties," color bars and a static-covered "TNF x Extra Butter."

Working with trend shops or small streetwear labels looks like a clever move. It makes people feel The North Face has really slipped inside a subculture's relatively closed circles and is making things for them, instead of being what it was years ago: a big brand to attach yourself to and admire from a distance. This may be one way to reach young people whose tastes now shift and scatter.

In his interview with QDaily, Tim Sedo even brought up Higher Brothers, the rap group from Chengdu, and Shangguan Zhe, the streetwear designer based in Xiamen. Partnering with people like that, he thinks, lets the brand grow along with them, so consumers pay back in feeling and buy the products the way they'd follow a star — "maybe what we need isn't consumers but fans."

And indeed, although "subculture" in China today is not what it was in America two or three decades ago, it can still work as a reason to spend.

Working with designers in different cities on trend "sub-lines," with Japan a key piece

The North Face's trend lines fall into clear categories marked by the color of the label; the ones mentioned most are Japan's Purple Label, Korea's White Label and Italy's Red Label. What they share is a local designer redesigning traditional outdoor clothing to serve city life. Japan's Purple Label came first, in 2003; the other two only appeared after 2014.

Collaborations with Japanese designers and brands have mattered a lot to The North Face's "turning cool," though this seems hard to avoid for other outdoor brands with the same ambition. According to the American lifestyle outlet Gear Patrol, the lifestyle-leaning outdoor market in Japan has always been fairly lively; besides The North Face, the American snowboard equipment maker Burton and the outdoor brand Gregory both make and sell products specifically for Japan.

"What has happened in Japan, and is still happening, is that they genuinely value the craft, the simplicity and the story behind a product. An object with no ornament is worth more than one hung with every bell and whistle. That's hard for us in America to understand; it's a way of looking that puts the story first rather than the technical muscle," an American designer told Gear Patrol, describing how Japanese outdoor product design has moved toward everyday life.

Seen this way, The North Face has been learning a style at the same time as it opens a market in Japan.

Purple Label is The North Face's most important line in Japan. When the partnership with the Japanese design brand Nanamica began in 2003, the designer Eiichiro Homma defined Purple Label as "high-end, a fusion of fashion and function," "influenced by outdoor style while matching the lives of modern Japanese people." The idea came earlier than most of TNF's other city lines; The North Face's classic outdoor styles were already being remade back then into casual sportswear in functional technical fabrics.

The distinctive design, and how far ahead the idea was at the time, made Purple Label a trend banner of its own for The North Face. Purple Label was made and sold only in Japan until 2019, but according to GQ's interview with Homma, 40 to 50 percent of the Purple Label goods sold at Nanamica's Tokyo store went abroad. In 2019, Purple Label began selling in the United States, and an "International Purple Label" line launched alongside it, collecting 16 past Purple Label hits reworked to better suit Western bodies and taste. The North Face, which came out of America, had gone through a Japanese makeover and was now returning to America as though it were something new.

Beyond Purple Label, a look across The North Face's many collaborations shows that the work with Japanese designers and brands is relatively frequent and, like Purple Label, sets itself apart from American design by favoring restraint and a plain way of living. Several of the designers are themselves skilled at making city clothes out of functional technology — Junya Watanabe, for one; others lean toward trend and fashion, such as the labels Sacai and Mastermind World (formerly Mastermind Japan).

The North Face has also released collaboration pieces with BEAMS, the Japanese trend department store, where jackets and vests sit in one shop alongside crafts, magazines and traditional calligraphy and painting. Details exactly like these are what shape a sense of city life.

"Urban Exploration" becomes an official The North Face category — though there may be problems

While Tim Sedo was in Hong Kong as The North Face's Greater China marketing manager from 2015 to 2018, he spotted an opening: plenty of Chinese consumers were going to Japan and Korea to buy The North Face. Part of it was the weak yen at the time; part of it was that TNF's styles in Japan and Korea looked relatively more fashionable, Purple Label and White Label among them. Compared with North America, Sedo thought, China's market changes fast, demand rises quickly, and even business leaders are readier to try something new.

With those factors stacked up, in 2015 Sedo and his team opened one "Urban Exploration" (UE) store each in Shanghai and Hong Kong. At first the stores only sold goods shipped in from Japan and Korea; later UE got designers of its own and a flagship "Black Label" line. Black Label is positioned much like TNF's other trend lines, pushing a "techwear" look that puts "function and trend together."

Unlike the earlier color-coded "Labels," "Urban Exploration" is a bigger idea built on urban trends, running parallel to what TNF has been good at for years: "Mountain Sports," "Mountain Athletics" and "Mountain Lifestyle." A UE store, Sedo says, may carry clothes from any of the "Labels": the UE store in Beijing's Sanlitun, besides its flagship Black Label, started selling Purple Label this year.

Compared with the earlier Purple Label and White Label shops, UE stores have spread faster and further. By Sedo's account there are now more than 30 across Greater China, and the format has opened in Europe and the United States as well.

Of TNF's 35 stores in Shanghai, four are UE stores: Super Brand Mall in Lujiazui, iapm on South Shaanxi Road, Jiuguang Department Store on West Nanjing Road and Grand Gateway 66 in Xujiahui — all mass-market malls you can reach without much effort. The UE store Sedo describes as the 2015 test was in K11, the "art shopping mall" on Middle Huaihai Road in Shanghai, and it has since closed; a staff member at the iapm UE store said the closure had to do with foot traffic being too thin — "probably more of the people around there were buying luxury goods."

The UE store at iapm sits by the escalator on the mall's fourth floor and currently sells only Black Label. Xu Jinhua, a staff member, says the store gets 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a month; and, much like the mall's traffic overall, about 80% of UE's customers are between 25 and 45. Among Shanghai's four UE stores, he says, one reason the iapm branch converts well is that nearby South Shaanxi Road has NikeLab, Supreme and the like, which pull in young people who follow trends and can spend to match.

TNF UE's WeChat official account lists UE down jackets and coats at 3,000 to 4,000 yuan, T-shirts at 300 to 500 yuan and trousers at around 1,000 yuan — not far from what Purple Label costs in Japan now.

As things stand, Black Label under the UE banner is the TNF trend line easiest to get hold of on the Chinese mainland, easier than the collaborations or Purple Label. But how well that wider reach works, whether the reach matches the design's positioning, and how it squares with TNF's original "DNA" — these may still be problems.

A trend-magazine editor who would not give his real name and goes by "Hamster" thinks Black Label is "stuck in between — not quite one thing or the other." He mostly wears TNF for hiking and travel, so he leans to strongly functional pieces and often picks the plain-colored styles with "more trend potential" out of TNF's traditional outdoor range; some Black Label styles, he says, aren't suited to the outdoors at all. He also likes Purple Label's "mountain style," which he feels lets people "become one with nature inside the city — it's a way of living." Black Label's "urban techwear," by contrast, comes out of cyberpunk: "black, white, grey, cold." It isn't that he dislikes techwear; it's that buying Black Label for the techwear look seems to him a case where a bit more money buys something more specialized, like Italy's Stone Island.

At the iapm UE store, people around 50 still come in from time to time to ask about the clothes. One older man said, "I know The North Face — my kid bought me one," but "the jackets are too expensive; they must be for young people to wear." Kivan Qiao, TNF UE's PR representative, told QDaily that as a consumer she would rather see outdoor and city styles sold together in one shop: "it's all The North Face; people won't get confused."

As for Jiao Tianyi, he says he hasn't paid much attention to UE or Black Label. He thinks Black Label and UE have "more ways to get hold of them now," which makes them feel more like a brand for "ordinary young people": "Say you're someone who doesn't care about clothes at all — you could still run into UE and Black Label just wandering around. Purple Label, back when I was in college, would never have given you that chance."

In the end it is scarcity and a subtle sense of fashion that make "cool" what it is. For The North Face, working hard to hook itself to that, the odds of taking hold of consumers are just as subtle.

Cover image by Kristian Egelund via Unsplash. The long-format cover image shows the 2014 Supreme x TNF collaboration, from Hypebeast, cropped.