The North Face Enters The Fitness Field

As the world's largest professional outdoor sports brand, The North Face's operating revenue in FY2014 reached $2.2 billion, up 11% year on year. As in previous years, most of the revenue of this brand, which focuses on outdoor sports, comes from its outdoor products such as mountaineering and skiing.

But this year, The North Face doesn't intend to continue to "focus". It put forward the goal of 2015 - in addition to maintaining double-digit growth, it also hopes to increase more income from areas other than mountaineering and skiing. The North Face aims at the increasingly hot fitness market.

With the rapid popularization of the concept of fitness, since 2005, the number of global fitness people has increased at an average rate of 9% every year. This has also caused major sports brands to tilt to the fitness field, even Urban Traditional clothing brands such as Outfitters are also producing fitness clothing. Therefore, it is no surprise that The North Face covets the fitness market.

In fact, The North Face has launched some fitness apparel products in recent years. Due to the small scale of the products and the fact that Nike, Adidas and Lululemon and other sports brands have occupied the vast majority of the fitness market, the brands have not been able to obtain good benefits in the fitness field. In this regard, well-known investment company BB&T Corinna Freedman, an analyst at Capital Markets, once said: "In order to stand out, The North Face must capture some trends of outdoor sports lovers in healthy life. "

Soon after, The North Face had a new idea - the brand should become a lifestyle of target consumers to go deep into the fitness field.

"If you want to become a more powerful skier or climber, you must have specific training at ordinary times. What you can do is to keep regular daily fitness. Our brand should become the lifestyle of these outdoor sports people." Todd, president of the brand's Americas region Spaletto said in an interview with Bloomberg recently. He said that the target group of the brand in the fitness field is still the original mountaineering and skiing enthusiasts, with their daily training as the starting point. While expanding relevant product lines, the brand hopes to influence the lifestyle of these people.

How to "influence the lifestyle of outdoor sports crowd"? At the beginning of April, The North Face launched its first TV advertisement this year in the United States, mainly promoting its fitness clothing products. In addition, the film also calls on outdoor sports enthusiasts to participate in The North Free fitness training courses provided by Face. The course is open to outdoor sports crowd. From April 1, they can participate in free fitness training twice a week in five cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, to prepare for high-intensity outdoor sports such as mountaineering. The North Face helps consumers with daily training in the form of free courses, which is the first step that the brand claims to affect people's lifestyle.

It only covers five major cities, The North Face believes that it is far from enough to affect the life of consumers. Therefore, the brand also launched the same free video course on its mobile app, allowing all consumer Be able to participate. These video courses are aimed at Mountaineering , skiing and other specific outdoor sports, providing users with six weeks of training guidance.

"The video course is practical and can help its customers become better climbers, so it has been recognized by most users. It will strongly promote The North Face has become a lifestyle brand. " U.S.A Investment Service Agency Morningstar analyst Bridget Weishaar explained.

At present, The North Face is improving its product line in the fitness field while making efforts to penetrate into people's lives. The 50 year brand foundation and more than 500 brand stores in the United States will be an important advantage for the company to enter the fitness market. But Todd, President of the Americas Region Spaletto emphasized that in the field of fitness, the brand will still only focus on the original outdoor sports target group, and general fitness enthusiasts are not considered.