The North Face

The North Face was founded in 1966 by Doug Tompkins and Susie Tompkins (later Susie Buell) as a small mountaineering retail store in San Francisco's North Beach neighbourhood. The name comes from the mountaineering observation that the north face of a peak in the northern hemisphere is the coldest and most technically demanding. Within a decade the brand was producing its own tents, packs, sleeping bags, and outerwear, and was supplying the kind of serious expeditions — Everest, K2, Patagonia — that demanded gear that wouldn't fail at altitude. The brand's product canon settled around several archetypes: the Nuptse jacket (1992, named for the Himalayan peak), the Denali fleece (1989), the Mountain Jacket Gore-Tex shell, the McMurdo down parka, the Half Dome backpack. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, gorpcore made The North Face one of the dominant fashion brands of the decade — collaborations with Supreme, Gucci, MM6, Junya Watanabe, Brain Dead, and Online Ceramics put the brand in cultural rotation it had never previously occupied. The North Face has been owned by VF Corporation since 2000 (alongside Vans, Timberland, Smartwool, and Dickies). Brand revenue passed $3.5B globally in recent years. The Berkeley R&D facility (the 'Innovation Pursuit Center') and the Athlete Team — including Alex Honnold, Hilaree Nelson (deceased 2022), and Conrad Anker — keep the technical credibility intact even as the brand has become a global cultural object.