The bold lettering stamped on the front of prAna’s plastic-free garment bags is confident, but cautious.

“This Is A Test
” the bags declare, explaining that prAna is experimenting with methods of shipping that don’t require plastic polybags. It’s a declaration that could characterize the company’s journey for the past decade, a crusade on plastic sparked by a single photo. Now, the time for testing is over. For prAna, this fall marks the beginning of a new era.

Beginning in August, Plastic Impact Alliance member prAna is using 100 percent plastic-free packaging across the entirety of its operations. That means garments arrive at customers’ doors with no plastic polybags, hang tags, or fasteners.

“We’ve left no stone unturned trying to eliminate plastic,” said Rachel Lincoln, prAna’s director of sustainability. “Reaching that 100 percent mark has been such a long time coming.”

A Decade Gaining Ground

By now, you may have heard the story that birthed more than a decade of dedication to cutting plastic in prAna’s operations. If you haven’t, it goes like this.

In 2010, at a prAna retail store in Boulder, Colorado, employees had spent the day unboxing products to put on the shelves. With every product came a plastic polybag, which the team piled up in a corner until the mound of plastic became a mountain. The day came to a close, and the store’s manager sent a photo of the plastic pileup to prAna headquarters along with a single question: “What do you expect us to do with all of this plastic?”

“It gave us a moment of pause,” Lincoln said. “We’re over here trying to do the right thing, trying to make responsible products, trying to use organic cotton and recycled polyester, and we hadn’t thought about the packaging.”

The company brought together staff from every department to figure out how to avoid creating more mountains of plastic. Roll-packing—tying rolled garments with recyclable twine or raffia and shipping them in master cartons—became the packaging method of choice. The change brought prAna’s packaging to 80 percent plastic-free, but certain garments—those with unstable dyes or heightened susceptibility to weather damage—still required the protection that individual polybags provided.

Enter the “This Is A Test
” bag.

Paper That Performs Like Plastic

To cut out individual polybags altogether, prAna turned to a paper product called glassine. The FSC-certified alternative is curbside-recyclable, 100 percent biodegradable, and made from wood pulp, just like regular paper.

“The [sustainability] team brainstormed how to convert a plastic polybag into a paper bag version,” Lincoln said. “We found the solution in the glassine paper bag.”

Glassine is produced using a method similar to standard paper, according to sustainable packaging company EcoEnclose. Wood pulp is bleached, spread on mats, and run through cylindrical presses called calenders. To produce glassine paper, sheets are ‘supercalendered’—run through the calendering process several times at different temperatures and pressures. The treatment results in an incredibly strong, dense paper with very little porosity, making it difficult for water and other contaminants to penetrate.

Between roll-packing and introducing the glassine bags, prAna has eliminated over 20 million polybags from its distribution process since 2010. Though some customers may worry about product safety after the switch away from highly-protective polybags, Lincoln is quick to put those concerns to rest.

“We don’t get returns because of dirty or damaged products due to packaging,” Lincoln said. “We can’t quantify it because it doesn’t happen.”

Welcoming Industry Competitors

This month also marks the first anniversary of prAna’s Responsible Packaging Movement (RPM), an effort urging brands in the outdoor industry to cut plastic and virgin forest fibers out of company packaging. Though many of the brands involved in RPM are direct competitors to prAna, Lincoln highlights the “pre-competitive space” that issues like sustainability occupy in the industry.

“The Responsible Packaging Movement was founded on that concept of collaboration,” Lincoln said. “How can we bring everybody together, share knowledge, and rise all boats?”

Currently, over 80 brands—including Burton, Hoka, and GSI Outdoors—are signed on to the movement, which provides education and space for the sharing of information and advancements in sustainability. Interested parties can email ​​prana_sustainability@prana.com to ask questions or join the movement themselves.

Plastic is still all but ubiquitous in the outdoors industry, but Lincoln hopes that prAna can be a model for brands looking to take steps towards plastic reduction.

“[Plastic elimination] is completely feasible,” Lincoln said. “Automation in companies’ distribution centers is still based around plastic, so there’s a bit of an unravel that needs to happen. There might be some retrofitting, but it’s feasible.”

The post With Innovative Bags, prAna Reaches 100 Percent Plastic-Free Packaging appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle stands a four-story, dark wood building with lots of windows. The Pacific Northwest sun shines down on a rooftop succulent garden and a deck of solar panels. The building is the new U.S. headquarters of waterproofing and aftercare company Nikwax, and like all of Nikwax’s products, it was designed with sustainability in mind.

“Sustainability is a big focus for us,” said Heidi Allen, vice president of marketing at Nikwax. “We wanted to land in an office that encompassed those values, and also offered our employees a good place to work.”

The new headquarters, which employees began using in March 2021, runs completely on renewable energy. Behind those full-length windows and dark wood, Allen and her team works on another sustainability goal: cutting plastic consumption. From the milk jugs in the office fridge to the company’s manufacturing sites across the U.S. and Europe, Nikwax is scrutinizing every piece of plastic in its supply chain.

Banishing Virgin Plastic

Nikwax is in the middle of a multi-year crusade against virgin plastic. In 2018, the company conducted a corporate plastic footprint survey to identify where virgin plastic in its supply chain was coming from and how best to reduce its overall plastic consumption across operations. The report investigated every inch of Nikwax’s plastic use.

“We had two main areas that we wanted to address: reducing the use of virgin plastics we took in, and reducing the single-use plastic that we put back out into the world,” Allen said.

Most of the product Nikwax makes come in liquid form—the company is known for its waterproofing solutions—so bottles are necessary for transport and consumer use. According to the report, bottles accounted for 68 percent of Nikwax’s total plastic use, the remaining percentages coming largely from packaging tape, spray heads, and bottle caps.Ìę

Finding an alternative to virgin plastic for these bottles was the company’s first goal. Nikwax landed on recycled plastic for its new bottles; the company also considered plant-based plastics, but worried about the damage to the environment both from the feedstock the plastics are derived from and their end-of-life. Bioplastics perform similarly in the environment to virgin plastic, as environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck detailed in National Geographic’s examination of bioplastics. If it ends up in the ocean, a plant-based plastic bag might fragment, but won’t break down.

After determining that it would use recycled plastic, Nixwax faced a new challenge. The company needed a supplier to produce bottles made completely from recycled plastic but the bottles also had to fit into Nikwax’s production infrastructure.Ìę

“Trying to find alternatives that fit with our existing filling systems and such was a big pain point,” Allen said.

Nikwax eventually partnered with Dutch manufacturing company Flestic B.V., and results were immediate. In the company’s first year after the footprint report, Nikwax saved 170 tons of virgin plastic—enough to fill more than 2,000 garbage bags or about 20 20-yard dumpsters.Ìę

Switching the bottles to recycled material cut a massive chunk of the company’s virgin plastic intake, and there are more cutbacks ahead. By the end of 2021, Nikwax expects 90 percent of the plastic it uses to be recycled.Ìę

The Road to 90 Percent

The biggest step towards that goal will be switching bottle caps, which account for about 20 percent of Nikwax’s plastic use, to recycled plastic. The company needed to figure out how to make the colored caps with the grey-tinted recycled plastic while keeping the color specs the same, but Nikwax expects to get there by the end of this year. At the same time, the company is also examining its crannies—searching for minor sources of plastic to change or eliminate, such as moving from plastic packing tape to paper-based.

Because the liquid product ships in bottles, Nikwax is generally able to avoid using polybags—those clear plastic bags that pose one of the outdoor industry’s biggest waste issues. Unfortunately, there’s a big exception: certain distribution companies, including Amazon, require Nikwax to encase its products in polybags anyway. In these instances, Nikwax turns to commercially compostable polybags to avoid using virgin plastic.

“It isn’t the best solution, because it does require municipal composting,” Allen said. “We tried to find the best available polybag solution that wasn’t virgin plastic.”

So-called “biodegradable” polybags present their own issues—the bags only break down under certain conditions, requiring specialized facilities to degrade fully. In the U.S., these commercial composting facilities are few and far between—according to a 2019 BioCycle report, only 185 exist across the country. Recently, companies have been experimenting with more sustainable solutions to the polybag question.

Continuing the Cycle

Ensuring plastics actually get recycled after they leave Nikwax’s facilities is the other side of the sustainability coin. Recyclability of outgoing materials inevitably relies on consumers to take initiative and recycle plastic themselves. Allen acknowledged that while emphasizing recyclability is important, recyclable plastics may only be as good as the awareness the company is able to instill in its customers.

“The bottles are recyclable, but we can’t come to your house and make you put it in the recycling bin,” Allen said.

The bottles carry a stamp on the label, letting customers know they are recycled and recyclable. It’s a visual reminder that Nikwax hopes will help the bottles end up back in circulation as recycled plastic.Ìę

Nikwax’s current goal is to make 99 percent of the plastic leaving its facilities recyclable by 2023. The bottles, caps and spray heads are currently all recyclable, meaning much like the company’s intake of virgin plastic, the progress made toward this goal will be in minutiae like outgoing packaging tape, garbage bin liners and pens.Ìę

For a company founded on the notion of sustainably extending the lifetime of gear, all this attention to plastics is logical, said Allen.Ìę

“It aligns with our company’s focus on consumption reduction. Whether we’re talking about gear or plastics, we’re using less new material and less stuff ends up in landfills.” 

The post Plastic Impact Alliance Spotlight: Nikwax Keeps Plastic Usage Cyclical appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Nemo’s journey to eliminate polybags began in 2019, on the floor of a distribution warehouse in Riverside, California.

Theresa Conn, the camping gear company’s global distribution and sustainability manager, had been called to the warehouse to look over a “transportation packaging audit.” With a handful of coworkers, Conn pulled boxes of items off shelves at random and looked inside. She was surprised to find vast inconsistencies: plastic banding was being used on lightweight boxes that didn’t require it, and polybags encased tents that had been safely shipped without them for years. Across the board, there was just too much waste.

“It was really eye-opening,” Conn said. “We thought, ‘If we’ve been shipping some products without polybags, and it’s been fine, why are we using [polybags] at all?’”

The realization sparked Nemo’s desire to get rid of polybags, culminating in the company’s latest plastic-removal initiative, the 100K Polybag Elimination Project. Starting in 2019, Nemo phased polybags out of the shipping process for all items except for its sleeping bags, which are at higher risk of moisture damage and require total protection from the elements. The program sets a “new transportation packaging standard” for the company, says Conn.

NEMO takes aim at polybags

Once the audit revealed that Nemo’s tents and other gear could be safely shipped without polybags, eliminating the outer bags was a no-brainer. It saved time (Nemo wouldn’t have to open the bags and remove the products before sending them to customers), money (15 to 20 cents per unit), and significantly slashed plastic waste in its supply chain. In 2020, Conn estimated Nemo saved one ton of plastic on its best-selling tent, the Hornet 2-Person, alone.

After doing away with the outer bags, Nemo set its sights on the inside of the tent roll. A polybag still encased each tent’s poles when the company received them from its supplier, South Korea-based DacÌę±ÊŽÇ±ô±đ. Nemo coordinated back and forth with the manufacturer, challenging Dac to reimagine its own packaging.

“It was an uphill battle,” Conn said. “Dac is a huge supplier, and we’re getting bigger, but we’re not The North Face.”

For Nemo’s 2021 tent line, the partners landed on a solution: an undyed, uncoated pole bag made from Repreve fiber, a fabric crafted from recycled water bottles. This bag specifically is what inspired the 100K Polybag project name, as the bag will save Nemo 100,000 polybags over the first two years of the initiative. The project netted Nemo a Green Good Design 2021 award for Green Product.

The benefits to the initiative don’t begin and end with Nemo, though. Throughout the process of developing the new bag, Dac and Nemo tested methods of shipping tent poles, and found that in the vast majority of situations, polybags were unnecessary. Starting in July 2021, Dac will ship tent poles to certain partners without polybags.

Nemo was part of Dac’s first cohort to receive poles without polybags, along with sunshade maker Shibumi and tent manufacturers Hilleberg and Helsport. Currently, Dac is testing the program with Big Agnes and REI, with hopes to expand it to all of its partners—more than 40 companies including giants like The North Face and Mountain Hardwear.Ìę

Nemo’s sustainable future

With single-use plastic polybags eliminated from Nemo’s tents, chairs and accessories, the company is setting its sights on solutions for its sleeping bags. Because most of its bags are down-filled, shipping them without any sort of moisture protection runs the risk of significant product damage.Ìę

“Right now, we have emails bouncing around at Nemo about better ways to handle polybags for our sleeping bags,” Conn said.

At this point, the company is aiming to use polybags that contain recycled plastic and are recyclable, but Conn noted that a number of solutions are on the table. For the individual sleeping bags, Nemo is exploring options from compostable PLA bags—biodegradable bags made from plant compounds—to stone resin packaging, a waterproof cardboard substitute made by mixing resin with calcium carbonate. Additionally, the company is currently testing a shipping system that uses one master carton polybag instead of individual bags for sleeping bags, with hopes to implement the practice in 2022.

Conn also highlighted the importance of varied sustainability initiatives, including projects focused on emissions reduction and materials waste. She cited a 2016 Quantis/Textile Exchange Apparel CO2 footprint study which found that 98 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are created prior to product distribution; this stark picture of waste led Nemo to create the Chipper, a sitting pad made from recycled foam that—just over the past year—saved 8.8 tons of foam waste and 48 tons of CO2 emissions from foam incineration.

A major portion of Conn’s focus remains on emissions, but the plastic-focused initiatives NemoNemo has implemented over the past two years have demonstrated sustainability success.

“I think [reducing plastic waste] is an awesome entry point into sustainability for any brand,” Conn said. “The goal is to eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.”

The post NEMO Equipment and DAC Poles Innovate to Solve the Polybag Problem appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Aaron Azevedo remembers exactly where he was when the power of GrundĂ©ns’ latest sustainability initiative really hit him. The fishing apparel company’s VP of product was sitting in his home office, watching over Zoom as a coworker removed product samples from GrundĂ©ns’ new packaging. The samples themselves, though, weren’t as exciting to Azevedo as the home-compostable packaging they came in.

“All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Look at the bags! Look what we’re doing!’” Azevedo said.

What GrundĂ©ns is doing is ambitious. Patagonia tried and failed to eliminate polybags—the single-use plastics that present one of the biggest sustainability challenges in the outdoor and fashion industries—in 2014. Prana, despite making great strides in this area and now roll-packing most of its clothing, has yet to completely eliminate polybags from all of its shipping. Very few companies have managed to quit polybags altogether, but this year, GrundĂ©ns will become one of them.

“I believe it’s scalable [to the larger industry],” Azevedo said. “We talked to a number of [packaging manufacturers], and more and more companies are getting involved with PLA.”

Instead of polybags, GrundĂ©ns is transitioning to bags made from polylactic acid (PLA), a biodegradable, plant-based polymer. The bags, cut into strips and tossed in a home composting system, will decompose fully within a year. The process takes longer than a traditional compost breakdown of egg shells, coffee grinds, and carrot peels, but once cut up, as GrundĂ©ns directs customers to do, the bags won’t obstruct normal composting. In around nine months, the bits of bag will break down into the compost soil.

GrundĂ©ns, a new member of the Plastic Impact Alliance and maker of apparel for commercial and recreational fishermen, aims to transition all packaging to the new bags, thereby eliminating all single-use plastic packaging from its supply chain, by late summer of 2021. The company is already shipping several new product lines in the bags, and results—in terms of product protection, efficiency, and customer satisfaction—have been promising.Ìę

The initiative just might serve as a model for companies looking to eliminate polybags in a similar fashion.

Grundéns Compostable Packaging: A Complete Overhaul

The impetus for GrundĂ©ns to shift away from plastic packaging came several years ago, when executives at the company came across research declaring that by 2050 the world’s oceans would contain more plastic than fish.

“That hit home for GrundĂ©ns,” Azevedo said. “Because if there are no healthy oceans, there are no healthy fish. And, boom, GrundĂ©ns is out of business.”

Food-grade packaging entered the conversation when an executive brought coffee bean packs into the office, wondering if similar packaging would work for apparel. GrundĂ©ns then began reaching out to manufacturers online, until the company landed on one—China-based Shenzhen Stars Trading Co., Ltd. Shenzhen Stars, which handles mainly food-grade packaging, agreed to develop GrundĂ©ns’ vision, and the quest to build a better polybag began.

Rolling out the bags across GrundĂ©ns’ operations has been a challenge, owing in part to the global nature of GrundĂ©ns’ business. With plants across Europe, Central America, and Asia, the company has worked to make the transition as smooth as possible.

“There was initial pushback [on the rollout],” Azevedo said. “Each factory inherently wants to buy their own product from their own supply chain.”

Import duties in the EU have complicated efforts to use the new bags in Europe, so GrundĂ©ns is currently working to develop similar biodegradable packaging within the EU’s borders. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű of the EU, factories have come on board to make the initiative work. Still, the new bags are already in use across the Americas and Asia.

Solving the Polybag Problem

Polybags present one of the outdoor industry’s toughest sustainability dilemmas. The clear plastic bags offer superb product protection during shipping and weigh next to nothing. Polybags are also inexpensive, but they carry a different kind of cost—they’re difficult to recycle and often end up in landfills or the ocean.

Historically, bags and plastics billed as “compostable” have presented their own set of problems. Unlike GrundĂ©ns’ bags, these plastics aren’t compostable at home; they require special, hard-to-find facilities known as industrial or commercial compost sites, where they only break down under intense heat and pressure. But because the plastics carry “biodegradable” on the label, customers often throw them in their own garbage or recycling, where they generally end up in landfills, degrading no faster than a fossil-fuel plastic would.

Having confirmed the bags were home compostable, Grundéns needed to check a few more boxes to feel good about the switch to PLA bags. The company had to ensure the bags would measure up to the performance of a traditional polybag, able to protect product over long shipping voyages. The company tested the bags on shipments from Vietnam, China, and Europe, and each test produced the same result: the bags held up.

The bags are twice the thickness of a traditional polybag—a paper outer layer allows for printing and labeling, so that the bags can still be identified and scanned throughout the shipping process. Despite this fact, Azevedo isn’t concerned about their weight as it pertains to shipping. The biggest detractor is financial—the bags are pricier than plastic, which the company estimates limits profit by 15 to 40 cents per product—but GrundĂ©ns has a simple plan for dealing with the extra expense.

“We absorb [the cost],” Azevedo said. “We negotiate pretty heavily with the supplier to get down to a price that we can absorb. It is a ding on margin, but it’s manageable, and we think it’s important to do. It’s our investment in the future, so to speak.”

Bags with a Purpose

GrundĂ©ns launched the new bags with its spring 2021 product collection, and executives have already begun to receive positive feedback from customers.Ìę

“Customers are ringing up our service line and saying, ‘Hey, we liked GrundĂ©ns before, but we love you even more now that you’re doing this,’” Ashley Williams, GrundĂ©ns’ VP of marketing, said. “That’s not why we’re doing it, but it’s always really nice when somebody takes the time to ring you up to say, ‘Hey, just want to comment on the packaging, I wish other companies did it.’”

Customers have even been posting the new packaging on social media; Azevedo has seen posts from customers’ Instagram accounts featuring the bags. Williams appreciates the bags’ popularity, but emphasized that the focus of GrundĂ©ns’ initiative is still on the planet.

“Sustainability is not a project, or a one-off,” Williams said. “It’s the way we do things. We have to do it, and we want to do it. We’re lessening our impact on the Earth—it’s part of our DNA.”

The post Has GrundĂ©ns Solved the Polybag Problem?  appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

For the past two years, Debbie Read has been counting.

Since 2019, Read, Rab’s corporate social responsibility manager, has tallied everything from carbon emissions numbers to plastic usage and kicked off a number of big sustainability initiatives. Next month, she’ll see her work go public.

“In mid-May we’re launching our first ever sustainability report,” Read said. “This is a time to pause and reflect, to look at where we’ve gotten to to date, and look at where we’re going.”

The report, which Read expects to be an annual update, will contain data on žéČčČú’s carbon emissions, recycled materials usage, and packaging efficiency. It will also outline prescriptive targets for reducing packaging and emissions and increasing the use of recycled materials. The report is an opportunity for Rab to celebrate the inroads its sustainability initiatives have made, but also a method of holding the company accountable, according to Read.

“We’ve now committed to this, externally. We’ve written it down in black and white,” Read said. “This is now real, and we can be held accountable for it.”

While Rab is tight-lipped about the soon-to-be-released report’s specific findings and targets, Read gave us a sneak peek.

žéČčČú’s Ascent to Net Zero

žéČčČú’s most ambitious sustainability initiative is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. The path to neutrality will be long and arduous, Read admits, and Rab doesn’t have every curve mapped out yet. But she notes that setting the goal now, despite questions about how to get there, was crucial because of the urgency of the climate crisis.

“I don’t have a roadmap in front of me that says, ‘This is what we’re doing every year between now and 2030,’” Read said. “But it’s no good, waiting until all of the answers are there. Everything you read about climate change is that we’re already too late. We should have acted a generation ago. If Rab sits here and waits until all the answers are in place, then we’ve wasted probably another generation.”

A year into the initiative, the company is taking steps to reduce emissions and other waste. All of žéČčČú’s UK operations, as well as most of its operations across Europe, are now powered by 100 percent renewable energy. The company opts for ocean freight, a cleaner alternative to air shipping, wherever possible, and has purchased a fleet of electric vehicles for land travel. Carbon removal projects like tree-planting and forest protection services help Rab offset the emissions they do create.

žéČčČú’s Take on Polybags

The outdoor industry has arrived at a reckoning with polybags in recent years. Though the clear plastic bags are light, cheap, easily manufactured and provide protection on long shipping voyages, they also create mountains of plastic waste and can be difficult to recycle.Ìę

“What we (decided) to do was stop treating plastic as waste, and start treating it as a resource,” Read said.Ìę

It’s been a challenge to reduce plastic use while maintaining product protection, especially because much of žéČčČú’s apparel is manufactured in Asia and must survive long shipping journeys before arriving at customers or distributors. Eliminating polybags from žéČčČú’s shipping process would compromise the safety of products like žéČčČú’s down jackets, so the company currently uses polybags made from material that is at least 50 percent recycled. In the coming years, Read hopes to work with polybag manufacturers to introduce more recycled materials into the bags while maintaining quality.

Rab also makes an effort to keep polybags inside the company’s operations, and not foist them off on their retailers or customers, who might have difficulty properly recycling them. Recycling polybags is much easier for Rab than for the average consumer, says Read, so the company removes polybags in its distribution centers, then delivers products to customers in paper or cardboard, holding onto and recycling plastic products itself.

žéČčČú’s Commitment to Upcycling Down

Since its founding, down-filled apparel has been central to žéČčČú’s product line. To make these products more sustainable, Rab introduced recycled down into lines such as the company’s best-selling Microlight jacket series.

“It was a bit of a nervous time for us,” Read said of the 2020 decision to fill the Microlight Collection with recycled down. “We had a number of key retailers really question us about that decision
 it was the first time we’d gone so big on recycled down, and the Microlight is such an iconic product.”

So far, the recycled down jackets have performed just as well as their virgin down counterparts. This year, Rab is taking its down initiative one step further—the company will set up down collection stations in its own brick-and-mortar stores for customers to dispose of old down-filled items like duvets and pillows. The project has two boons—Rab can recycle down in-house, plus raise awareness, signaling to customers that down doesn’t have to end up in a landfill.Ìę

With a handful of ambitious initiatives on the horizon, the upcoming sustainability report is an appreciation of žéČčČú’s first steps on what looks like a long journey.

“If you’re not careful, you forget to stop and celebrate what you’ve done,” Read said. “We now have an opportunity to call out the (sustainability advancements) that a lot of people have worked hard on.”

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As of October 2020, Instagram registered over a billion unique monthly users. If a picture truly is worth a thousand words, then a wide-reaching Instagram account is—well, it’s valuable. But how can outdoor companies make the most of an audience waiting on the other end of a screen?

We examined and chatted with some of the biggest outdoor brands on the photo-sharing platform to find out what works for them.

GoPro (@gopro)

Follower count: 17.7 million

Date joined: March 22, 2012

Total posts: 6,120

Account Overview

When it comes to outdoor brands on Instagram, GoPro easily leads the pack. Almost four times more users follow GoPro than other brands like The North Face and Patagonia. The company keeps its users engaged, too—videos on GoPro’s page regularly notch hundreds of thousands of views, and photos generally amass close to one hundred thousand likes, outperforming brands with similar follower counts like Starbucks and Calvin Klein. GoPro generally posts on the account twice a day, with posts spaced apart by several hours.

Useful Strategies

There’s one thing you won’t see on GoPro’s Instagram: Any of the company’s products. Rather than focusing on the cameras themselves, the page highlights what’s in front of them, posting everything from skiing backflips to scuba dives to airplane stunts. GoPro saves the flashy product photos for its website, but on Instagram, the brand sells experiences—experiences their cameras can document.

The North Face (@thenorthface)

Follower count: 4.8 million

Date joined: February 14, 2011

Total posts: 427

Account Overview

The majority of The North Face’s Instagram posts can be broken into two categories: product-focused and athlete-focused. The brand’s product-focused posts look like a classic advertisement: The product and TNF logo are front and center. Captions for these posts tell users what the product is, how it works, and where they can get one. Athlete-focused posts feature partnered athletes in action, and don’t stress as much about brand recognition—in most of these posts, it’s tough to tell whether the athlete is even wearing TNF gear. The account posts three to four times a week, and mixes up video and photo content.

Useful Strategies

Senior director of digital brand management Zeena Koda says the alternation between product advertisement and “brand content”—athletes, outdoor images, and storytelling—is intentional. In fact, while it’s not an exact science, Koda has a rough benchmark for the breakdown.

“I think a 60-40 balance is healthy, but it’s never that clear-cut,” Koda said. Her goal is to feature “brand content” in about 60 percent of TNF’s posts, while the other 40 percent highlights specific TNF products.

Patagonia (@patagonia)

Follower count: 4.6 million

Date joined: May 17, 2012

Total posts: 2,757

Account Overview

Like TNF, Patagonia posts content three to four times per week. The page is extremely photo-heavy, and video content generally involves some sort of call to action. Patagonia also posts a significant number of call-to-action graphics highlighting the climate crisis and environmental justice.

Useful Strategies

Patagonia’s Instagram bio simply reads, “We’re in business to save our home planet.” The philosophy is evident in the brand’s posts, which tend to focus on sweeping natural landscapes. If humans are in Patagonia’s posts, they’re often small or far away, framing the outdoors as a space commanding awe, wonder, and respect. True product advertisements are rare on Patagonia’s Instagram—even Patagonia’s well-known logo barely makes an appearance on the page.

Timberland (@timberland)

Follower count: 3 million

Date joined: June 23, 2011

Total posts: 3,671

Account Overview

There may not be a more direct opposite to Patagonia’s Instagram page than Timberland’s. Timberland’s Instagram is about one thing: boots. Boots on models, boots floating in mid-air, boots in boxes. Name a way to display a Timberland boot and it’s probably on the company’s Instagram. Posts come like clockwork—exactly one post a day, usually hitting the profile by mid-morning.

Useful Strategies

“We want people to arrive at our social media pages and see what they love [our products], but also learn about what we stand for,” senior director of marketing Mike Isabella said in a statement.

Timberland does feature a number of social-justice-focused graphics on its page, but products drive the majority of the brand’s content. It’s a strategy that seems to work, in terms of engagement. When the boots take up nearly the entire frame, posts regularly hit tens of thousands of likes, and posts that feature models’ full bodies or otherwise draw away from the boots generally struggle to crack ten thousand likes.

Tentree (@tentree)

Follower count: 2.4 million

Date joined: March 30, 2012

Total posts: 568

Account Overview

The eco-focused apparel brand has a unique distinction as the only company on this list younger than Instagram. Like The North Face, tentree uses Instagram partially as an advertising venue—the page displays models wearing products from sweatpants to face masks. The rest of the account’s posts feature landscape shots and deforestation-awareness graphics similar to TNF’s ‘brand content.’

Useful Strategies

In terms of engagement, tentree’s nature-focused content significantly outperforms product advertisement on the page. Posts like this one depicting a glass-walled forest bedroom amass likes in the tens of thousands, while product-focused posts usually top out at several thousand.

REI (@rei)

Follower count: 2.3 million

Date joined: July 30, 2012

Total posts: 4,791

Account Overview

REI’s Instagram feed is all about people in the outdoors. This may not seem revolutionary for one of the country’s largest outdoor retailers, but as other brands have opted for product-focused posts or landscape photos without people, most of REI’s posts bring humans and natural spaces together. These posts generally perform well, usually reaching five-digit like counts. REI’s less frequent, landscape-only posts perform similarly, while the account’s few product advertisement posts hover around five thousand likes.

Useful Strategies

There’s a not-so-secret weapon at play in boosting engagement on certain REI posts. Every so often, REI will caption a photo with a question, like “Why do you hike?” or “What are some of your silver linings from 2020?” Posts with a simple question in the caption drive hundreds of people to the comments section; by comparison, most other posts see between 30 and 50 comments. Questions boost likes, too—posts captioned with questions generally rack up thousands more likes than similar posts without questions.

Oakley (@oakley)

Follower count: 2.2 million

Date joined: January 19, 2012

Total posts: 184

Account Overview

Like Timberland, Oakley’s Instagram page is dominated by product-focused posts. Goggles and sunglasses are always the focal point, and while accounts like Patagonia and TNF place their products against a natural backdrop, Oakley’s posts are mainly close-up facial profiles. The eyewear brand is one of the least prolific posters on this list, uploading content at most three times a week.

Useful Strategies

Rather than models, Oakley leans heavily on the allure of professional athletes wearing its products to boost engagement—athletes like cricketer Rohit Sharma, the focus of three posts that each cracked one million likes. It certainly helps that Oakley is partnered with the NFL, and superstar players like Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson are featured prominently on the page. NFL-related posts often rack up hundreds of thousands of likes, a massive engagement number for an account with just over two million followers. Non-NFL athletes help engagement numbers, too: Snowboarder Jamie Anderson and other snowsports pros appear in several well-performing posts.

YETI (@yeti)

Follower count: 1.5 million

Date joined: July 20, 2012

Total posts: 2,413

Account Overview

Like many of the outdoor apparel and gear brands on this list, YETI’s Instagram posts focus on its products in use. In terms of engagement, most of YETI’s posts perform similarly, hovering around six to nine thousand likes. The account doesn’t flood the timeline with posts, sending an image or video out roughly once a day.

Useful Strategies

When it comes to product advertisement, YETI’s posts are reminiscent of product placement in a movie or TV show. Posts don’t advertise a specific product like The North Face’s do; instead, most posts focus on a larger scene—an ice fishing trip, a duck hunt, a day at the beach—with a YETI product included and prominently displayed. The YETI logo catches the eye in almost every post, but rather than advertise a specific cooler, say, posts advertise YETI as a brand.

Salomon (@salomon)

Follower count: 933k

Date joined: July 24, 2013

Total posts: 2,270

Account Overview

Salomon’s Instagram focuses heavily on the company’s two best-known product lines: skis and running shoes. The page is image-heavy, generally using video content to profile featured athletes. Likes are generally consistent between five and ten thousand, and the account generally posts once per day.

Useful Strategies

Salomon’s page is one of the most product-focused on this list—whether on ski tips, shoe tongues, or bindings, the Salomon logo is visible in nearly every post. Most products are identified in the caption for consumers to find them easily, and almost all are depicted in action.

Arc’teryx (@arcteryx)

Follower count: 932k

Date joined: February 7, 2012

Total posts: 2,801

Account Overview

Arc’teryx, similar to brands like TNF and tentree, posts a mix of product advertisement and athlete-driven content. Engagement patterns for Arc’teryx’s content are opposite these other brands, though—Arc’teryx’s product advertisement posts generally outperform landscape shots and athlete profiles by a few thousand likes or more. The account posts about once a day, and generally alternates posts between its content categories.

Useful Strategies

Like many of the brands on this list, Arc’teryx runs secondary, geographically-localized Instagram accounts alongside its main account, which director of brand experience Jurgen Watts credits with expanding the brand’s social media reach.

“Our strategy as a company is to develop
 localized Instagram channels for our communities,” Watts said. “If you live in the Bay Area, we want to make sure that there’s a Bay Area feed that is very localized.”

Compared to Arc’teryx’s main Instagram channel, these localized accounts have significantly lower follower counts—generally not more than a few thousand followers. Some posts from Arc’teryx’s main feed will show up in these smaller channels, but posts also feature athletes wearing Arc’teryx gear in recognizable local spots.

The post The Strategies Behind the Outdoor Industry’s Biggest Instagram Accounts appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In order for Camp Bespoke to bring glamping to northern Kentucky, its owners will have to lock down some significant funding.

“For us to be able to open with our twelve-unit footprint, we are fundraising for about $250,000,” Camp Bespoke founder and CEO Nicole Brassington said this week. “If we are able to obtain that money within the next month, then we will be able to have an April opening with the smaller footprint.”

The twelve-unit operation will be a partial launch of the camping and recreation center, which aims to appeal to the nature-loving casual camper, according to Brassington. The compound will have 36 lodging units between its cabins, cottages and tipis, and for the more outdoorsy, 32 campsites where guests can pitch a tent. Camp Bespoke is situated on a 31-acre plot of land in Williamstown, Kentucky, about 50 minutes north of Lexington.

It’s been a long road for Brassington and her co-owners, who set out to create Camp Bespoke in 2019. The pandemic threw several wrenches in the group’s efforts, as important meetings were canceled, approval to move forward was delayed, and the cost of materials rose.

Trying to get a start-up off the ground as four Black women in the hospitality industry—where, as Brassington points out, less than 1 percent of owners and CEOs are Black—has also been challenging, especially in fundraising. The task of launching Camp Bespoke carries that additional weight in Brassington’s mind.

“Representation matters,” Brassington said. “There are people that could never imagine seeing someone who looks like them doing a project like this.”

While the ownership group is pursuing investors to cover the $250,000 general cost, they’ve set up a GoFundMe for a more urgent deadline (link below). The $65,000 that the GoFundMe seeks to raise by February 21 will cover the camp’s completed electrical work.

The post A Black-Owned Outdoor Business in Kentucky Faces a Fundraising Deadline appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.