“Sleeping Giant - The Story of Mountain Hardwear”

Web feature providing an insight into one of the outdoor industry’s most mysterious brands

“Anyone who spends enough time on outdoor subreddits will understand they function solely as an echo chamber for people to obsess over their new Arc’teryx, The North Face & Patagonia kit. But hang around long enough, sift through enough echoes, and you’ll begin hearing whispers from a different kind of person – someone who has no love for the big three. Instead, they pledge their allegiance to one brand. Mountain Hardwear.

Yes, Mountain Hardwear (MH). That brand with the intriguing bolt logo, and even more intriguing people wearing it.

MH enthusiasts are the kind of people who spend their lives in the mountains. They’re the kind of gear aficionados who actually notice an extra gram of down in their jacket, and genuinely require the immense hydrostatic head of GORE-TEX Pro. From the small subset of people you’ll have seen wearing/talking about the brand, it’ll be clear that MH isn’t for the faint-hearted, and neither was the process of setting the company up.

Despite MH’s hardy reputation, the brand itself is young. Founded in 1993, it’s a baby compared to the likes of TNF and Patagonia. Yet even at birth, MH felt strangely familiar. That’s because it had been quietly living in the consciousness of its nine founders for decades – slowly blossoming, while they continued to keep the lights on at Sierra Designs, until eventually it was time to jump ship.

Those nine founders were made up of five women and four men, all individuals who had spent years in the industry, and even longer in the mountains. Their leader was Jack Gilbert, a former Stanford University Basketball player turned outdoor trailblazer. He had worked for 20-years at The North Face before becoming president at Sierra Designs – until one fateful day in 1993, he led his entire team to depart from the company.

The walkout wasn’t fuelled by ill intent (although they did try and collectively purchase Sierra Designs, only for the deal to fall through) – just the concept that together, this team of nine could achieve something even greater. And they wasted no time in pursuing it – only three months after the brand’s founding, they unveiled the Exposure Parka, a fully-fledged three-layer mountain jacket created in partnership with GORE-TEX. This iconic garment paved the way for a healthy relationship with Robert W. Gore, which would see countless more MH icons come to fruition in later years.

The brand’s baby steps weren’t without patches of discomfort, though. Mike Wallenfels (one of the nine-chosen ones) recalled in an interview with OutInUnder:

“We had just come up with the Mountain Hardwear name and logo, and didn’t have time to sew on the patches, so they were stuck on with tape. I remember that first trade show we were showing samples, and every time I pulled the jacket out of the rack, the logo would fall off of it. Our carpet was covered with double-stick tape logos by the end of the trade show“

Questionable branding aside, it was immediate from the get-go what MH was about – high-quality outerwear, for the hardest conditions, sported by even harder athletes. The no-expense-spared approach to design had been carried over from Sierra Designs and TNF. And then quadrupled.

In those early years, there were no hard and fast rules to the company, let alone roles. MH was operating on a shared buzz for producing the best gear possible, and it proved to be enough – the established partnership with GORE & PolarTec continued to act as a catalyst, producing icons like the Chill Factor Fleece Jacket & the Subzero Down Jacket.

By the late ’90s, MH enthusiast communities were beginning to crop up – obsessing over the brand’s gear and its unbelievable durability – long before Reddit ever existed.

Another talking point about the brand was the visual design. MH couldn’t look more ’90s if it tried. That quirky bolt logo, with the bright yellow accent (originally inspired by a tool shop called ‘American Hardware’) is to this day, the only better outdoor brand logo than Arc’teryx. The iconic branding, paired with bright blue, yellow, red and orange colours – contrasted with black panels – made MH immediately recognisable. People who wore the brand wanted to be seen – not only because they were proud of their jacket, but also so they’d be easier to spot in the event they wound up in an accident during an expedition.

Looking to build on their initial success, Gilbert & his disciples came to decide that mountaineer Ed Viesturs would be their first sponsored athlete. A decision that would pay dividends when he became the first American to climb all fourteen 8,000 metre peaks, all while sporting that quirkly bolt logo.

All of the noise around the brand meant that MH didn’t ever really need to do any marketing – the genre of maniacs wearing their brand, including Viesturs, was singlehandedly doing better marketing than they could ever achieve through paid advertising. A user on one of the very Reddit threads we previously mentioned stated:

“I used to do a bunch of ad work for them in a past life, and was at their Richmond CA HQ (and company store!) every other week. We showed lots of interesting work that I think would have been really great for their brand, but we never actually made any ads”

This reluctance to market, promote or advertise their product, even until recently, is likely one of the reasons that MH has remained something of a sleeping giant – at least in regard to people wearing it on the high street.

After developing some of the best tents in outdoor history, alongside several more iconic shell jackets, the brand turned its attention toward down products. Shaving grams off your kitbag really mattered to the typical MH wearer, so the brand began pushing the limits to see how lightweight they could make a down jacket. This culminated in the release of their Nitrous Down Jacket in the early 2000s, a piece of outerwear with a face fabric so lightweight that it could only be produced in Japan. This would lay the foundations for today’s Ghost Whisperer – a highly revered jacket that sits unquestionably in the pack of any serious Ultralight through-hiker.

Without us trying to sound too deep, the main reason MH has remained somewhat in the shadows (at least when compared to its industry counterparts) is that they’ve always kept it 100% real. Over the course of history, the brand has cared little more about creating great products, and that’s exactly what keeps a certain heavily moustached, hard-climbing, slightly crazy consumer coming back again and again.

MH aren’t afraid of what they are, or where they came from. They’re proud of their icons, which is evident in their willingness to reissue past designs – and, more evidently, in their repeat collaborations with Stüssy. Those projects saw pieces like the Subzero Jacket brought back to life, not as watered-down logo slaps, but as a reminder of just how forward-thinking the designs were in the first place.

A fashion collaboration might sound at odds with everything MH stands for, but that’s only if you misunderstand the intent. MH rarely collaborates, and when it does, it chooses partners who actually understand the product. Stüssy isn’t there to make the gear fashionable – it’s there to contextualise it. To reframe that unapologetically ’90s design language of both brands for a new audience, while leaving the performance, materials, and attitude of the original pieces entirely intact.
The unwavering dedication to producing fantastic gear – and nothing more – is the appeal of Mountain Hardwear. The brand has never had to convince anyone. It exists for people who know what they need from their gear, and who trust experience over marketing. The colours are bold because visibility matters. The specs are obsessive because margins are non-existent when you’re actually in the mountains.

The reason for that can be traced back to the beginning. Jack Gilbert and eight others didn’t leave Sierra Designs out of frustration or ego – they left because they wanted to make something better. That belief shaped the brand long before those first taped-logo jackets ever hit the rail.

Three decades on, the bolt is still worn by the same type of person it always was – someone who spends more time in the outdoors than talking about it. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, Mountain Hardwear aren’t going to waste their breath telling you.

“Sleeping Giant - The Story of Mountain Hardwear”

Yes, Mountain Hardwear (MH). That brand with the intriguing bolt logo, and even more intriguing people wearing it.

The brand’s baby steps weren’t without patches of discomfort, though. Mike Wallenfels (one of the nine-chosen ones) recalled in an interview with OutInUnder:

Questionable branding aside, it was immediate from the get-go what MH was about – high-quality outerwear, for the hardest conditions, sported by even harder athletes. The no-expense-spared approach to design had been carried over from Sierra Designs and TNF. And then quadrupled.

By the late ’90s, MH enthusiast communities were beginning to crop up – obsessing over the brand’s gear and its unbelievable durability – long before Reddit ever existed.

“I used to do a bunch of ad work for them in a past life, and was at their Richmond CA HQ (and company store!) every other week. We showed lots of interesting work that I think would have been really great for their brand, but we never actually made any ads”

This reluctance to market, promote or advertise their product, even until recently, is likely one of the reasons that MH has remained something of a sleeping giant – at least in regard to people wearing it on the high street.

The reason for that can be traced back to the beginning. Jack Gilbert and eight others didn’t leave Sierra Designs out of frustration or ego – they left because they wanted to make something better. That belief shaped the brand long before those first taped-logo jackets ever hit the rail.

Three decades on, the bolt is still worn by the same type of person it always was – someone who spends more time in the outdoors than talking about it. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, Mountain Hardwear aren’t going to waste their breath telling you.

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