Ski brand Halfdays looks beyond the slopes with first physical store

The ski slopes are slowly opening up, on mountains from Aspen to Zermatt. Halfdays is ready to gear women up for the pistes with its first permanent store in Denver, Colorado — a short drive from many of the country’s top slopes. Founded in 2020 by former Olympic skier Kiley McKinnon, Ariana Ferwerda and Karelle Golda, Halfdays launched with ski gear. It was a response to a problem McKinnon and Ferwerda identified: a lack of good women’s options for skiing. Halfdays’s goal is to bridge performancewear — a sector dominated by legacy players like The North Face and Peak Performance — with fashionable offerings. Most women’s offerings in the category are dominated by what Ferwerda calls the “shrink and pink” method, meaning shrunken-down men’s jackets in new colourways. And on the fashion side, dominated by brands including Perfect Moment, Bogner and Moncler, prices tend to climb out of reach for the average consumer. Halfdays is the middle ground, Ferwerda says. “We’re really trying to reach this fashion customer that doesn’t necessarily want to spend $4,000 on their outfit, but wants to look chic and feel good on the mountain.” It hit a nerve. After just one season, the waitlist for Halfdays’s ski pants was 10,000 people deep, according to the brand. It launched wholesale in 2021 (earlier than anticipated; wholesale now makes up about 15 per cent of sales). Halfdays saw eight-figure revenues from 2023 to 2024. In 2024, the brand saw 86 per cent year-on-year growth, along with triple-digit wholesale growth, though the team declined to share specific sales figures. Since launch, it’s hosted one Aspen pop-up, two in Denver and one in New York. Now, the Denver store marks a shift in Halfdays’s trajectory. After its first couple of successful ski seasons, the brand established itself as a contender in the skiwear space. But since then, it’s launched hike, trail and activewear collections. The Denver store will serve to get the message out: “Having a full, year-round retail space really allows us to share the story of Halfdays as an outdoor apparel brand, not just a ski brand,” Ferwerda says. This product expansion is informed by learnings from wholesale. “There is a huge evolution in sportswear and outdoor apparel right now,” Ferwerda continues, pointing to retailers like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. “They’re all trying to figure out: what are the brands that merge outdoor and active?” As technical brands like Salomon and Arc’teryx make their way into the fashion lexicon, there’s ample opportunity for cross-category growth. Halfdays intends to double down on that intersection. Refining growth To propel its next growth phase, Halfdays is refining its strategy, with new additions to the team and a shift in marketing strategy. The brand was founded in fashion’s direct-to-consumer heyday — and the founders rode the wave. “We pretty much built the brand off of PR and influencer gifting, plus a bit of social,” Ferwerda says. Initially, the pair managed marketing on their own, investing instead in product experts. “We frontloaded building out our product team, because the product is so technical,” Ferwerda explains. So these were the experts the pair brought on early. Marketing was at the hands of the founders. “It was what we’ve wanted to see in the outdoor industry,” McKinnon says. But a shift in the creator economy called for a strategy overhaul. “It was a lot more valuable to get products in influencers’ hands [in 2020],” Ferwerda says. “It’s changed a lot. You have to be so much more intentional with who you’re working with.” McKinnon agrees. “It’s really about working with people that feel organic to the brand, not just working with these people that have hundreds of thousands of followers,” she says. This is where the new hires come in. Halfdays just added two marketing and influencer relations roles to its staff count, including a VP of marketing who was previously at La Colombe. (Yes, the coffee roasters — Halfdays likes to hire from industries outside of outdoor apparel.) Now, the brand is ramping up the internal production of its own creative. (They’ve also just hired their first full-time photographer and art director.) But it’s still focused on community. McKinnon underscores the power of user-generated content — from brand fans, not influencers. “We’ve done such a good job of growing our community and gathering these people who are excited to be a part of the brand,” she says. “That has done so well for us when it comes to marketing because we have all these real-life customers posting about us on their Instagram, tagging us, wanting to be mentioned in our stories and wanting to feel like they’re a part of our brand.” This is also why Denver was Halfdays’s first stop for a standalone space. “We started by building our community here. The mountains are here. It makes the most sense to start in Denver and then expand from there,” McKinnon says. The next year will be “really, really high growth”, Ferwerda says, citing the brand’s key new hires, strengthened wholesale relationships and forthcoming product collaborations on the horizon. Over the next two to three, the founders are planning on expanding Halfdays’s retail footprint beyond its first Colorado store (New York City will likely be second). And after that? “Long term, we want to be global,” Ferwerda says. “We want to have year-round categories for outdoor and active apparel for women. And be available to a lot of customers across the world.” Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. More from this author: The business of Addison Rae Why everyone’s talking about Aupen How Wild West Social House turned clothing rental into a club

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