In Part 1, we looked at how Huckberry turned YouTube into a customer acquisition engine — a content-commerce loop where the product calendar drives the shows, and the shows drive the funnel. It's a model that's working at $200 million in revenue and growing.
But Huckberry isn't operating in a vacuum. Four other outdoor brands have built serious, sustained YouTube presences — and each one reflects a fundamentally different idea about what content is for.
Together, these five brands map the landscape of how outdoor and lifestyle companies are using YouTube in 2026. And the gaps on the map — the brands that haven't invested — are just as revealing as the strategies that are working.
YETI's YouTube channel has around 140,000 subscribers. That's a fraction of what a brand at its scale — $1.66 billion in 2024 revenue — might expect. But subscriber count misses the point entirely, because YETI isn't playing the reach game. It's playing the taste game.
For the past decade, YETI has operated a series called YETI Presents — roughly a dozen short films per year, produced with the kind of care you'd expect from an independent studio, not a cooler company. The films follow fly fishermen, pit masters, surfers, ranchers, and mountain guides. The product is barely visible. The emotional register is quiet, specific, and human. These aren't brand anthems. They're portraits.
The results speak in a different currency than views. YETI Presents films have screened at Banff Mountain Film Festival, DocUtah, and Boulder International Film Festival. YETI won Ad Age's In-House Agency of the Year. And the Pretty Wild Fellowship — launched in partnership with Free Solo directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi — awards four filmmakers $50,000 each in unrestricted grants annually, attracting 330 applications from 30 countries in its first year.
Scott Ballew, who built YETI's content operation, has been clear about the strategy: YETI's content exists to make the brand mean something beyond its product category. When you see a YETI cooler at a tailgate or on a fishing boat, the films are part of why it feels like it belongs there. The content builds the cultural territory the product occupies.
This is the hardest model to measure and the hardest to replicate. It requires creative taste, institutional patience, and a willingness to let content exist without a conversion tag on every frame. YETI has roughly 150 ambassadors across fly fishing, mountaineering, surfing, ranching, and BBQ — but they're storytelling subjects, not salespeople. The content operation runs with an in-house team of about ten people, including a two-person traveling camera crew that embeds with subjects for weeks or months at a time.
The brand logic: We sell coolers and drinkware. But the brand lives in a world of people who are interesting, capable, and quietly excellent at what they do. If we tell their stories well enough, the brand absorbs their credibility.
Patagonia's YouTube presence is, predictably, unlike anyone else's — because Patagonia's relationship to commerce is unlike anyone else's.
The brand has produced nine feature-length documentaries, including Artifishal (about hatcheries and wild salmon), Blue Heart (about hydropower in the Balkans), and Public Trust (about America's public lands). These aren't brand films with an environmental angle. They're environmental films made by a brand. The distinction matters.
Artifishal screened more than 500 times globally — at Patagonia retail stores, gear shops, community centers, and film festivals. Blue Heart helped generate 175,000 petition signatures that Patagonia says contributed to a European Union resolution against small hydropower dams. The content had a measurable political outcome.
Patagonia's creative team operates with what former creative director Alex Lowther described as a mandate to tell stories with no commercial intent. The content isn't designed to sell jackets. It's designed to advance the environmental mission that — since Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership to the Holdfast Collective and Patagonia Purpose Trust — is literally the reason the company exists.
On YouTube, this translates to a library that functions more like a nonprofit's media arm than a brand channel. The Run To series connects running to environmental advocacy. Short films profile community organizers, indigenous land stewards, and grassroots activists. The subscriber count and view metrics are secondary to whether the content moves people to act.
The brand logic: We exist to fight the environmental crisis. Content is one of the most powerful tools we have to change minds, mobilize communities, and create political pressure. If it also makes people feel good about buying our gear, that's a secondary benefit.
Salomon TV is the quiet heavyweight: 287,000 subscribers, over 105 million views, and 1,098 videos across a network of 25 owned channels. In raw scale, it's the largest YouTube presence of any brand in our coverage universe.
But the more interesting story is the strategic pivot. In 2025, Salomon partnered with Stept Studios to relaunch Salomon TV — not as a highlights reel of athletes doing extraordinary things, but as a documentary series about people and their relationship to nature. The CMO explicitly said the brand was moving past what he called "sports action porn" toward something more human.
The new films tell character-driven stories: a community in the French Alps, a trail runner navigating grief, a designer inside Salomon's Annecy headquarters. The production partnership with Stept was designed to bring cinematic credibility to content that had historically been produced for a niche audience.
Salomon's approach differs from YETI's and Patagonia's in a structural way. Where YETI makes standalone films and Patagonia makes advocacy documentaries, Salomon TV operates like a seasonal sports network. Content rolls out across 25 channels over 12-month cycles — ski content in winter, trail running in summer, hiking in shoulder seasons — creating a rhythm that keeps the community engaged year-round. The films have screened at DocUtah, No Man's Land Film Festival, Banff World Tour, and Boulder International Film Festival.
This model builds a media moat around Salomon's competitive sport ecosystem. If you're deeply into trail running or mountain sports, Salomon TV is a destination — a place you go to see the stories behind the athletes and places you care about. Over time, that habitual viewership creates something more durable than a marketing impression. It creates an audience that identifies with the brand's worldview.
The brand logic: We own the trail running and mountain sport narrative. Our content is the connective tissue between our athletes, our events, and our community. The more time people spend inside our content universe, the more the brand becomes inseparable from the sport itself.
Here's where things get interesting — and maybe unexpected for our audience.
Arc'teryx, the $2 billion+ brand known for technical precision and a famously controlled aesthetic, has been quietly building a content operation that doesn't fit neatly into any of the other models. It's not a media company like Salomon TV. It's not a production house like YETI. It's something else: a content strategy that's wired directly into the brand's physical experience infrastructure.
Start with the films themselves. 109 Below — a 14-minute documentary about the harrowing 1982 rescue of climber Hugh Herr on Mt. Washington, produced with Stept Studios (the same production partner behind Salomon TV's rebrand) — won the Sundance Brand Storytelling Producer Award, a Platinum Muse Award, a Bronze Clio, and was a Vimeo Staff Pick. Ground Up, a 35-minute film following Amity Warme and Brent Barghahn's ground-up free ascent of El Niño on El Capitan, pulled over 400,000 views in its first weeks. The Problem Solvers series, running since 2019, follows adaptive athletes and engineers designing prosthetics for climbing. These aren't promotional content. They're films that happen to have a dead bird logo in the credits.
But here's what separates Arc'teryx from the other four models: the content doesn't live primarily on YouTube. It lives inside a physical ecosystem.
The "No Wasted Days" campaign — Arc'teryx's first-ever global brand effort — launched in October 2023 with eight films about 11 explorers, then rolled into a 22-market global film tour. Not a digital campaign with a launch event. A film tour — screenings at Arc'teryx stores and partner venues across North America and Europe, with immersive experiences in cities like New York. The films were the catalyst for in-person community gathering.
And the results show up in the physical business. The "No Wasted Days" campaign drove a 127% year-over-year increase in ReGear trade-ins (Arc'teryx's resale and repair program) and an 80% increase in Arc'teryx Academy attendance. The Academy — which has run since 2011, training participants in alpinism, backcountry skiing, running, and climbing — now operates across 150+ stores globally.
Karl Aaker, the SVP of Brand Marketing who joined from Nike and Lululemon in 2021, has been building toward this deliberately. The content doesn't exist to build a YouTube audience. It exists to activate Arc'teryx's physical touchpoints — stores, academies, repair centers, film events — and to give those experiences emotional weight.
This is a fundamentally different architecture than Huckberry's content-to-commerce funnel or YETI's brand-as-cultural-curator approach. Arc'teryx is using content as the connective tissue between its physical brand experiences. The film brings you to the store. The store introduces you to the Academy. The Academy deepens your relationship with the product. The repair service extends it. Content is the entry point to a loop that's built around participation, not just purchase.
The brand logic: We build the best technical gear in outdoor. Our content makes you feel what it's like to use it — and then we give you 150+ physical locations where you can learn to use it yourself. The film is the invitation. The experience is the product.
Five brands, five distinct answers to the same question: what is YouTube content for?
Huckberry → Content as commerce engine. Shows drive a measurable acquisition funnel. The product calendar and the content calendar are the same thing. ROI is direct: entertainment → audience → purchase.
YETI → Content as cultural positioning. Films build the emotional territory the brand occupies. ROI is indirect but powerful: the brand means something beyond its product category.
Patagonia → Content as mission amplification. Films advance the environmental mission. ROI is measured in political outcomes, petition signatures, and cultural influence — not sales.
Salomon TV → Content as community infrastructure. A seasonal content network that keeps the brand's sport ecosystem engaged year-round. ROI is in audience retention and narrative ownership.
Arc'teryx → Content as experience ecosystem. Films feed a physical infrastructure of stores, academies, and repair centers. ROI shows up in program participation (Academy attendance, ReGear trade-ins) and in-store engagement.
Each model works. Each reflects a different brand truth. And each requires different creative capabilities, investment horizons, and tolerance for ambiguity in measurement.
Now look at who's not on this list.
Now look at who's not on this list.
Hoka — now past $2 billion in annual revenue after years as one of the fastest-growing brands in footwear — doesn't have a comparable owned content strategy. Neither does On, which just crossed CHF 3 billion. Nike ACG, in the middle of its most ambitious outdoor push in decades, is investing heavily in athletes, events, and retail — but not in owned long-form content.
These are three of the biggest brands in our coverage universe. They have the resources, the athlete rosters, and the stories to tell. And yet none of them has built an owned content operation on the scale of what YETI, Patagonia, Salomon, Arc'teryx, or Huckberry have created.
There are defensible reasons. When you're growing at 25–35% annually on the back of performance marketing and wholesale expansion, the marginal dollar is better spent on what's already working. Building a content operation takes years to pay off. The growth-stage playbook says: scale the channels that scale, and worry about brand moats later.
But "later" is arriving. On's growth has cooled from 35% to the mid-twenties. Hoka's quarterly growth dipped to 11% after years of 25–35% gains. The brands that rode paid acquisition and wholesale door growth to extraordinary scale are now entering a phase where brand affinity — the kind that makes someone choose you when the algorithm isn't telling them to — becomes the competitive advantage.
The five brands profiled here started building that advantage years ago. The question for everyone else is whether they can catch up — and which model they'd follow if they tried.
If you're a brand manager at one of the growth brands reading this, Huckberry's model is probably the most immediately actionable. Not because it's the best — each model has strengths the others lack — but because it has the most legible business case.
"We're spending X on Facebook and Google ads with declining returns. What if we reallocated 15% of that budget to building shows that generate their own audience, and wired the content to our product calendar?"
That's a pitch a CFO can understand. It's harder to pitch "let's make award-winning documentaries about fly fishing" or "let's fund environmental activism through film" — even if those strategies have built two of the most beloved brands in outdoor.
But the deeper lesson from all five models is that the content has to be actually good. Not good for a brand. Good, full stop. YETI's films stand up at Banff. Patagonia's documentaries screen at film festivals alongside independent productions. Arc'teryx's 109 Below won at Sundance. Salomon TV's new series was specifically redesigned to be more cinematic and character-driven. And Huckberry's DIRT is being shopped to Netflix.
The bar isn't "better than other brand content." The bar is "content people choose to watch." That's the moat, and it's not built with a bigger media budget. It's built with creative taste, editorial judgment, and the institutional patience to let something find its audience before demanding a conversion metric.
The brands that move into this space over the next 12–18 months will tell us a lot about where the industry is heading. A few signals worth tracking:
Hoka has been investing in events and athlete storytelling but hasn't consolidated it into a YouTube content strategy. If Deckers' growth continues to decelerate, expect pressure to build owned media channels. Jim Walmsley alone could anchor a documentary series.
On has the design sensibility and the European creative DNA to produce something distinctive. Their athlete roster — from the Kambundji sisters to a growing stable of triathletes — provides natural storytelling subjects. The question is whether Zurich will invest in content with a longer payoff horizon than their performance marketing engine currently demands.
And Nike ACG, with its deep pockets and its ongoing push to earn credibility in outdoor — could a content investment be the thing that finally convinces the skeptics we identified in our February coverage? Nike's history with long-form content is thin, but its storytelling muscle in short-form campaigns is unmatched. The question is whether they'd build something owned or just outspend everyone on production value.
The race to build owned audiences on YouTube is still early. The five brands that got there first each chose a different path. The brands that follow will have to choose their own — and the choice will reveal what they actually believe their brand is for.
