The North Face says walls are meant for climbing

A climbing day for anyone who wanted one

On 15 August 2017, The North Face announced "Walls Are Meant for Climbing", a global campaign launched with Global Climbing Day four days later, on 19 August.¹ The brand's own history describes the day as the culmination of the campaign.² Partner climbing gyms across the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico and China opened their walls to the public, with additional events in New York, Shanghai and London.¹ The agency behind the work, Sid Lee, puts the number of participating climbing centres at more than 50.³

The release stated the idea in two sentences: "Walls aren't meant to divide us, they unite us. Walls are meant for climbing."¹ The brand's own history records the campaign as "a global movement to bring people together through the power and community of climbing".²

Funding for public walls

The campaign was built on commitments rather than images alone. The North Face pledged $1 million to The Trust for Public Land to support public climbing walls in more communities, with a focus on underserved areas, and $5 for every gym visitor on Global Climbing Day, up to $50,000, to Paradox Sports, an organisation that makes climbing accessible to people with physical disabilities.¹ GearJunkie reported that Paradox Sports had served 450 climbers with disabilities in 2016.⁴ The release listed USA Climbing, the Access Fund and the American Alpine Club among the partners, and named the brand's athletes Alex Honnold and Ashima Shiraishi.¹

Tom Herbst, global vice president of marketing at The North Face, framed the wall as a social object: "We see walls as a place to unite our communities through the sport of climbing."¹ He went on to describe climbing as a sport that depends on trust and partnership, which is the quality the campaign wanted to transfer from the rope to the neighbourhood.

Pairing the line with a public land trust gave it a concrete form. Sid Lee's work included a poster campaign.³ Funding public walls turned the slogan into something built, meant to outlast the campaign

The political context

The campaign appeared in the summer of 2017, the first year of Donald Trump's presidency, whose campaign had promoted a wall on the border with Mexico from 2015.⁵ Sid Lee's case study describes a campaign "that called for an end to the current political climate surrounding immigration" and summing it up: "Instead of building walls to separate people, we built walls so that people could come and climb them."³

The line itself names only walls, climbing and community. A reader who sees nothing political in it still gets a complete message about a sport. A reader who brings the border debate to it hears a position that the brand's own release never spells out, though its agency describes the work in exactly those terms.

For an outdoor brand, the construction carried a specific advantage. Its credibility in climbing is long and documented, from sponsored expeditions to athletes such as Honnold. A statement made through climbing therefore sounds like the brand speaking about its own field, not like a company commenting on politics from outside. Spoken through climbing, the message stays within the brand's own field, while those who look for the political meaning can find it.

Inviting beginners in

The participation figures show who the campaign actually reached. According to the Engage for Good case summary, more than 15,000 people took part in Global Climbing Day, and "roughly 40-50% were new to the gym and/or first-time climbers".⁶ At the Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco, the brand built an 18-foot bouldering wall to invite festival-goers to try.⁶ Taking the wall to a music festival met people where they already were, rather than waiting for them to come to the mountain, a move the brand would repeat a year later when it carried its idea of exploration into New York's music scene.

Those numbers describe a brand recruiting rather than preaching to the converted. With up to half the participants new to climbing, the day widened the sport's entry point and brought in people who had never tied in. Each of them met the sport through The North Face, which made the brand the host of their first climb, not only the maker of gear for experts.

The brand kept the idea. Its official history lists Global Climbing Day and the campaign among its milestones of 2017, alongside Honnold's free solo of El Capitan the same year.² Placed next to each other, the two entries show the range the brand claims: the most extreme climb of its time and the first climb of a beginner, both under the same name.