The North Face

Equipment for the Steepest Side of the Mountain

The North Face specialises in jackets, fleecewear, luggage and shoes designed to withstand the forces of nature, and its clothing and equipment lines are catered towards climbers, mountaineers, skiers, snowboarders and hikers. The performance wear is famous for its use on mountaineering expeditions on Mt. Everest. That customer list is the definition's core: every category named is equipment for cold, altitude or snow, and the Everest reference sets the standard the products are measured against. The name was chosen on the same logic, because the north face of a mountain, most notably that of Mt. Everest, is generally the steepest, coldest and most difficult to climb. A brand name that states a difficulty rather than a product tells a buyer what the equipment is intended to survive before any garment is described.

A Store in 1966, a Subsidiary Thereafter

The North Face was created in 1966 in San Francisco, when Douglas Tompkins decided to establish an equipment retail store, which eventually acquired the name The North Face. The business therefore began as a retailer of equipment, and by the 1980s skiwear was added to the line of products, and eventually camping equipment was as well — a growth from selling outdoor goods into making and broadening a line of its own. Mr. Tompkins sold the business in 1968, a strikingly short ownership for a founder, and he and his wife began the ESPRIT clothing brand. The North Face is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the VF Corporation, so the San Francisco equipment store of 1966 sits today inside a large apparel group, still under the name chosen for the hardest side of a mountain.

The Denali Jacket and a Campus Presence

The line of clothing is also noted for its high cost, and its Denali jacket is one of the most popular items of clothing on college campuses. Those two observations describe the brand's second life beyond expeditions: equipment built for mountaineers, priced at a level that marks it as premium, worn as everyday clothing by students who are not climbing anything. The logo supports that separation between expedition use and street use, because it is recognisable at a distance: a slightly skewed quarter-circle with two lines running within it, supposedly an interpretation of the Half Dome rock formation in Yosemite National Park, with THE NORTH FACE embroidered in large block letters beside it. A mark drawn from a Yosemite rock formation and a name drawn from Everest put both of the brand's reference landscapes directly onto the garment.