✳️ Escaping the Messy Middle
A Trailmix of news and opinions on the business of trail running
Hey pals 👋 Thank you to all those that completed the short survey last time around. I’d love to hear from more of you as towards what you like and want to be improved about Trailmix, it honestly is so useful actually knowing what you’d like to see more of. For instance some of you actually want weekly posts and a podcast that isn’t another interview, so I’ll see what i can do about that :) This week we have the grand reshuffling of outdoor brands, an epic initiative by Threshold and New Balance enters the trail running group chat… Hope you enjoy, Matt
Mammut Attempts to Leave the “Messy Middle”
What? Mammut, a Swiss outdoor apparel and gear brand, announced a new positioning in a spicy new campaign “Not a streetwear brand”.
Reactionary: the positioning is designed to be in reaction to the direction of brands in the outdoor industry who are releasing more lifestyle and streetwear-style products to attract a broader audience.
According to Nic Brandenberger, Chief Marketing Officer, “Mammut has never been a streetwear brand and has no plans to be one. We are a brand for those who look for connection, adventure, and thrills in the outdoors and that seek growth in the mountains.”
In a LinkedIn post, Nic stated the reason for the reposition was to move out of the “messy middle”
“My team and I spent some time sketching a category map to compare and contrast our brand positioning to other brands. The map revealed a "messy middle" where outdoor and streetwear segments clash.
This isn't unusual. Especially the biggest brands in a category will stretch their offering across segments, as a way to capture new pockets of growth. In the outdoor industry, the GorpCore segment was a prime candidate for this strategy, and many brands serve this target well.
But this isn't for us. We are a mountain performance brand at heart, and we will not muddy that positioning.”
How it came to life: The campaign included a takeover of Granary Square in Kings Cross, London, with 3D projections that transported passers-by from the urban landscape to the great outdoors; a mobile billboard that parked outside the North Face’s London retail store; a CGI social post of an ice climber traversing a glass building; and a front page takeover across their UK website (which has now been replaced by a sale, go figure).
This isn’t the only outdoor brand repositioning: the North Face released a new positioning statement “We play different” in September to cement their roots to the outdoors space.
Whereas Salomon started the year with a new brand campaign “Welcome back to earth”, to speak to people who want to be outside more and whose intrinsic motivations are more about health, wellness and the community, than competition.
Why should I care? For the non-industry folk, all this jargon will look like just another ad. However, a new campaign or positioning is an indication of the direction the company is going. It’s an insight into what the company’s aspirations, values and behaviours. Whilst you may think you’re impervious to marketing, you buy a product for reasons beyond the functional product benefits. You buy a brand because it demonstrates something that is meaningful to you. Campaigns should remind and reinforce these connections, and maybe make it easier for others to see what you do. If it doesn’t, then you’re likely to look elsewhere.
Matt’s opinion: The story here isn’t about Mammut’s feisty campaign, but that outdoor brands are struggling to differentiate and find their place in the new outdoor market.
Outdoor brands have long relied on the technical expertise needed to create high performance functional garb as a moat that prevents many companies competing in the space. For a long time, everyone had their lane and stuck to it. Once you’re on that speciality retail shelf you made it.
As designers went freelance, shopping went online, and the ability to order thousands of SKUs from a random factory in China happened at the click of a mouse, building an outdoor brand became easier. All you need is some start-up capital from the bank of mummy and daddy, a friend who claims they’re a photographer after getting a Canon DLSR from Santa, and away you go!
To combat this outdoor brands started referencing their heritage as a marker of their quality – we’ve made hiking gear by hikers, for hikers, for decades, they protest. Yet when commerce became something that happens on a screen, aesthetics became the dominant form of differentiation, of how a brand would demonstrate their beliefs and values. Brands now can quickly build a cult following through aesthetics alone, hollowing out the advantage of historical underpinnings. As Eugene Healey puts it, the internet “took the aesthetics out of subcultures, and we stripped them of everything else.”
From a product perspective, outdoor brands who had extended their product lines to all things vaguely related to the outdoors to capitalise on more of the outdoor person’s life, have begun to lose ground to these smaller brands. Start-ups who have focused their efforts on being expert at a few select things, undercut bigger brands claims to expertise and erode their product differentiation further (think caps with Ciele, trail shoes with Norda, flasks with Yeti).
From a consumer perspective, there has been a shift towards versatility in outdoor wear, with more people opting for a stylish and functional garment, over purely performance products. This has made it easier for smaller brands to enter the industry, whilst bigger brands have struggled to cater to the changing consumer appetite.
Consequently, outdoor brands have recently realised that the outdoor market is starting to get hella crowded, and they’re fighting over a diminishing amount of frequent outdoors people when the growth audience is in people that only occasionally go for a hike, but want to appear like they’re sporty AF. Hence why North Face and Salomon decided to give ‘lifestyle’ and ‘streetwear’ a go, broadening their product line and aesthetics but stretching their focus beyond their core.
All in all, you now have a market full of historical brands whose claims to quality are being undercut, whose historical advantage has eroded, with product lines almost as broad as their target audience, desperately trying to appeal to everyone who goes outdoors once a day.
And so, here we have Salomon, North Face and Mammut all trying to make bold, fresh claims to new territories, or in Mammut’s case, returning to their core when everyone else is going broad. The former bets on broadening their appeal, the latter doubles down on outdoor enthusiasts. All trying to fight against a rising tide of competition, all trying to figure out their place in the new outdoors market.
Threshold Builds the Financial Case for Encouraging Gender Parity in Ultrarunning
About: Threshold Sports, a UK ultramarathon organiser, partnered with SheRACES, a female athlete network led by ultrarunner Sophie Power, to release a white paper titled The Ultra 50:50. The document outlines steps taken to address gender parity in Threshold's races and makes a financial case for greater inclusivity practices in race organisation and event management.
The challenges: The initiative worked to tackle five challenges to encourage more women to sign up to Threshold races:
Female representation and perception
Training and preparation
Access and support at events
Safety and harassment
Menstrual health and the menopause
Specifically, the organisation changed their marketing materials to be more representative, developed female-specific training guidance, extended cut-off times, supplied more sanitary products across the course and much more (full list in the whitepaper).
Fundamentally, these changes had tangible results in 2024:
Threshold saw a +13% increase in female participation on Threshold Trails Series events.
50k ultras saw a +59% increase in female participation, and 100k non-stop ultras +19%.
At Race to the King – the focal point of the Ultra 50:50 campaign – 424 women signed up to a 50k in 2024 compared to 214 in 2023, an increase of 98%.
New visitors to the Threshold website grew 273%
Whilst these are just short-term results, Threshold is continuing the investment next year with a campaign to recruit 500 women to try their first ultra.
No hot takes here, and no I’m not sponsored by Threshold, this is just a bloomin’ good initiative with compelling results that would likely sit on their website gathering dust otherwise.
[If you’re a race director, Threshold have also created a modelling tool to help event organisers assess the potential value of investing in their event to make it more accessible.]
If we had a group chat…
Welcome to the party, New Balance! New Balance have become the headline sponsor of the Mont Blanc Marathon for the next five years, replacing Salomon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is New Balance’s first large scale sponsorship in trail running and a sign that they really are taking the outdoors seriously.
Nike too have decided there’s money to made in the outdoors industry after announcing new directors and claiming in an internal memo “We are now investing more resources in this incredible growth opportunity.”
Start-up Zen Running Club trained Google’s new NotebookLLM on it’s blog posts to create AI podcasts. I know I’ve said we don’t need more interview podcasts in running before, but I didn’t think I needed to stretch that opinion to AI discussion podcasts too. Dear god no.
Hoka continued it’s never ending growth trajectory growing 32% on last year in the first half the year, reaching $2bn in revenue in the past 12 months. Not only did their revenue grow, but their market shares in road and trail across Europe have marched onwards. And of course, Vincent Bouillard got a shout-out.
Y11, a sports investment firm, has acquired Vacation Races, a US trail race and events company, to add it to its race portfolio, Motiv Group. What’s vaguely interesting about this is that trail running events are starting to get the same attention as road running events where private investment is a bit more common. And it’s probably the only time that I can mention rugby, my other love, in this newsletter (Y11 are majority owners of two rugby clubs).
Interesting take on why outdoor brands are struggling to differentiate and find their place in the new outdoor market. What do you think is fuelling consumer interest in 'stylish' outdoor wear?