How The North Face is building Circularity into outdoor gear

Beyond Performance: Why Circularity Matters in Outdoor Gear

Few industries depend on nature as directly as outdoor gear. After all, every product The North Face designs is made to be used in mountains, forests, rivers, and deserts. But with that privilege comes responsibility. The very landscapes that inspire outdoor brands are threatened by the global waste and emissions crisis that the apparel industry helps fuel.

For decades, outdoor gear companies focused almost exclusively on performance. Durability, weather resistance, technical features — these were the benchmarks. But durability alone is no longer enough. The real question today is: how do we extend not just how long a product lasts, but how many lives it can have?

That’s where circularity comes in. Circular economy principles offer a way for companies like The North Face to move beyond the traditional make-sell-dispose model. Instead of treating every jacket or tent as a one-time transaction, circularity creates systems where products are returned, repaired, refurbished, and reintroduced. Materials stay in circulation. Waste is minimized. And customers benefit from more affordable access to high-quality gear that performs as well as new.

For outdoor brands, this isn’t just a sustainability challenge. It’s a business opportunity. Circular models open new revenue streams, deepen customer loyalty, and position brands as leaders in a rapidly shifting market where consumers increasingly expect companies to take responsibility for their full product lifecycle.

The North Face has understood this shift. Over the past years, it has built one of the most comprehensive circularity strategies in the outdoor sector. Not as a side project, but as a core part of its business model. In the following sections, we’ll take a closer look at how they do it.

The North Face Renewed: Turning Used Gear Into Opportunity

For most brands, returned or damaged products are a costly problem. For The North Face, they became the foundation of an entirely new business model.

In 2018, The North Face launched its Renewed program. The idea was simple but powerful: give previously worn, returned, or lightly damaged products a second life through professional repair and refurbishment. Customers could now purchase high-quality gear at a lower price, while the company diverted materials from landfills and extended the life of its products. In the first years alone, more than 200,000 pounds of textiles were kept out of landfills — a clear signal of how much value usually gets lost in the linear system.

What started as a small resale platform quickly evolved. In 2022, The North Face scaled up the Renewed program through partnerships, including with Tersus Solutions, a specialist in cleantech and logistics. This collaboration added technological depth, improved logistics, and created a scalable infrastructure. Customers can now return used items not only in-store but also online, making participation much easier.

The Renewed program operates through a clear step-by-step process:

Step 1 — Collection: Customers bring back used The North Face gear to retail locations or submit items through the online trade-in platform.

Step 2 — Inspection: Each returned product is carefully assessed. Technicians check whether the item qualifies for renewal or resale, based on its condition.

Step 3 — Cleaning: Approved items are cleaned using Tersus’ proprietary waterless cleaning technology. This process minimizes environmental impact while maintaining product performance standards.

Step 4 — Repair and Quality Assurance: If needed, repairs are performed. Every item then goes through strict quality control to ensure it meets The North Face’s performance expectations.

Step 5 — Resale: Only products that pass inspection are resold on the Renewed online store, offering customers high-quality gear at a lower price.

To encourage participation, The North Face also offers a tiered trade-in credit system. Depending on the item’s condition, customers receive $10, $30, or $50 in credit for every qualifying product they return. This creates a clear incentive for consumers to engage with the program and keeps valuable gear in circulation.

The Renewed program shows that circularity is not just a theory for the future. When combined with the right partners, technology, and customer incentives, it becomes a fully functional business channel. Waste goes down, value goes up, and customers stay engaged — a win for the brand, the consumer, and the planet.

Circular Design Starts at the Drawing Board

If you want circularity to succeed, you can’t start at the end of a product’s life. You have to begin where it all starts: the design table.

The North Face understood this fundamental shift early and took an unusual step for the fashion and outdoor industry. In 2020, it launched the Renewed Design Residency, a program aimed at embedding circular thinking directly into its product development teams. The goal is simple: train designers to create products that can be reused, repaired, disassembled, and eventually recycled — by design, not by accident.

The North Face teaches its teams to apply four core principles when developing new products:

1. Durability: Build products that last longer, even under the harshest outdoor conditions.
2. Recyclability: Design garments that can be disassembled easily at end-of-life, separating materials for effective recycling.
3. Waste minimization: Reduce waste at every stage, from production scraps to post-consumer returns.
4. Responsible materials: Use recycled, renewable, or regeneratively sourced fabrics that support environmental goals from the very beginning.

This approach goes well beyond standard “sustainable materials” claims. Circular design at The North Face means creating entire products with reuse and recovery in mind, making sure nothing ends up in landfill unnecessarily.

In 2022, the company presented its first fully circular design collection. The collection included 20 product styles, covering adults, youth, accessories, and even plus-size items. What made this product line stand out was its single-fiber construction and simple trim choices. By using only one fiber type per garment, disassembly becomes dramatically faster and more efficient. During testing, technicians were able to separate 90% of the Osito jacket in just 20 seconds, and 97% of the Auburn jacket in only nine seconds. These numbers demonstrate not only technical progress but real-world scalability.

This mindset is actively taught to designers through the company’s partnerships. In collaboration with The Renewal Workshop, design teams participate in hands-on immersion sessions where they see firsthand what happens when products return — damaged zippers, broken seams, complex fabric mixes. Designers experience the real limitations of refurbishment and recycling. That feedback loop directly influences how they create new products going forward.

By building circularity into design education, The North Face ensures that circularity doesn’t remain a post-production problem. Instead, it becomes part of the creative process itself. Products designed this way don’t just perform better on the trail. They perform better across their full lifespan — and well beyond their first user.

The Take Back Program in Germany: Closing the Loop Locally

While global partnerships and advanced design are crucial, circularity also depends on local action. That’s exactly what The North Face is building with its Take Back program in Germany. This initiative brings circularity directly into stores, making it easy for customers to participate — and helping the brand keep valuable materials within reach.

The process is simple. Customers bring back their used The North Face gear — whether apparel, equipment, or footwear — to any participating store. Inside, they find dedicated Take Back bins where items are deposited for collection. There’s no complicated sorting or pre-approval process. The North Face handles the rest.

To motivate participation, every item returned earns customers a 10% discount on their next purchase. It’s a straightforward incentive that turns responsible disposal into an attractive choice. For customers, it means saving money while contributing to waste reduction. For The North Face, it means a steady supply of products that can be refurbished, resold, or responsibly recycled.

The returned gear follows a clear pathway. Items that qualify for refurbishment are cleaned, repaired, and resold through the broader Renewed program. Products that can’t be refurbished are either donated or recycled, ensuring that as little as possible ends up in landfills. This simple structure allows The North Face to capture materials that might otherwise be lost — while offering customers a sense of active participation in the brand’s sustainability goals.

Beyond the collection bins, The North Face has used the Take Back program as a platform for creativity. To celebrate the program’s launch in Germany, it partnered with ten young fashion design students to create the Remade collection. Using returned and recycled garments as raw material, these designers reimagined The North Face’s iconic aesthetic through entirely new lenses. The result is a vibrant showcase of what circular design can achieve when creativity meets resourcefulness. It’s not just about extending product life. It’s about giving products entirely new stories.

The Take Back program shows that circularity doesn’t need to be complex. With clear incentives, simple logistics, and a bit of creative vision, it’s possible to build local loops that deliver real impact — for business, for customers, and for the planet.

Scaling Circularity: Materials, Technology, and Partnerships

For circularity to work at scale, product design and take-back programs aren’t enough. The North Face understands that solving the deeper material challenges of the apparel industry requires innovation across the entire value chain. That’s why the company has been investing in new technologies, materials, and partnerships that go far beyond resale.

One of the earliest steps in this journey was the Clothes the Loop program. Launched as a pilot back in 2013, long before circularity became a mainstream topic, it allowed customers to drop off unwanted clothing and footwear — not only from The North Face, but from any brand, in any condition. These items were collected at retail and outlet stores across the U.S., Canada, and Germany. After collection, the garments were sent to I:CO (I:Collect), a global textile recycling company based in Germany, where they were sorted into more than 400 categories for either reuse or recycling. Although Clothes the Loop has since evolved into more advanced programs like Renewed and Take Back, it laid the foundation for customer engagement and operational know-how.

To tackle one of the most complex challenges in textile recycling, The North Face has also partnered with its parent company VF Corporation and the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) to invest in the Green Machine technology. This process addresses a key technical barrier: separating blended fabrics. Most clothing today contains mixed fibers, especially blends of cotton and polyester, which are notoriously difficult to separate for high-quality recycling.

The Green Machine changes that. Using only heat, water, and less than 15% biodegradable chemicals, it can separate cotton from polyester in blended fabrics while preserving the full quality of the polyester fibers. This makes true fiber-to-fiber recycling possible, unlocking a new pathway toward closed-loop textile production where materials can be used again and again at the same level of quality.

Beyond recycling, The North Face is also working upstream on material sourcing. The company has been investing heavily in regenerative agriculture as a way to produce better raw materials while restoring ecosystems. This includes sourcing regenerative cotton and rubber that are grown in ways that improve soil health, increase biodiversity, and reduce long-term environmental impact.

Through its partnership with Terra Genesis, The North Face supports rubber farmers in Thailand by financing peer-to-peer education programs and paying premiums for regenerative production methods. On the cotton side, the company is scaling regenerative farming practices across its supplier network, building a more resilient and sustainable supply chain.

These material innovations are essential for closing the full loop. Without solutions for blended fabrics, without responsible sourcing, and without scalable recycling systems, even the best take-back and refurbishment programs would have limits. The North Face shows that true circularity means working on every layer of the value chain, from fiber to finish.

Circular Commitments Backed by Measurable Goals

While many brands make sustainability claims, The North Face ties its circularity strategy to clear, measurable targets — and publicly tracks its progress.

By 2025, The North Face has committed to reaching several ambitious milestones:

• 100% of its top apparel materials — polyester, cotton, and nylon — will come from recycled, responsibly sourced renewable, or regeneratively grown sources.
• Single-use plastic packaging will be fully eliminated across its product lines.
• Supply chain emissions will be reduced, with key suppliers cutting their Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030.

These targets reflect a full value chain approach, tackling not just end-of-life recycling but also upstream material sourcing, packaging waste, and supplier decarbonization.

And the progress is already tangible. As of late 2022, The North Face had reached 80% recycled content across its synthetic fabrics used in apparel, accessories, and equipment. Its Renewed program continues to divert growing volumes of used gear from landfill, surpassing 200,000 pounds of textiles kept in circulation. And its leadership in circularity has not gone unnoticed. The brand has been recognized among the most circular fashion brands globally, ranking highly in the Circular Fashion Index (CFX) developed by Kearney, which measures brands on their efforts to extend product lifecycles.

Circularity at The North Face is not a marketing campaign. It is embedded in how the company sources, designs, produces, services, and renews its gear.

What Other Brands Can Learn

The North Face’s journey offers clear lessons for any company serious about circularity. It’s not about finding one silver bullet. It’s about building a full ecosystem — where design, operations, technology, and customer engagement all work together.

Start with design. Circularity is far easier when products are created for multiple lives from the very beginning. Simplicity, modularity, and single-material designs reduce complexity down the line.

Invest in infrastructure. Take-back bins, cleaning technology, and refurbishment capacity are not side projects. They are critical enablers that make resale, repair, and reuse economically viable at scale.

Use partnerships to accelerate. The North Face didn’t build this system alone. Collaborations with Archive, Tersus, HKRITA, Terra Genesis, and others provided the expertise needed to overcome technical and operational barriers.

Make it easy for customers. Incentives like trade-in credits and in-store drop-off bins lower the barrier to participation. The easier it is to engage, the more materials flow back into the system.

Commit with clear goals. Public, measurable targets keep the company accountable — and signal serious intent to customers, suppliers, and investors.

In the outdoor industry, durability has always been part of the brand promise. The North Face proves that circularity is the next logical step. It’s not just about making products that last, but making systems where products keep lasting — for multiple users, multiple cycles, and with maximum material value retained.