I discovered DIRT while killing time on a plane. I'd scrolled past everything else in the seatback entertainment system, landed on this food-and-adventure travel show I'd never heard of, and hit play mostly because the alternative was staring at the flight tracker. One episode in, I was hooked. I spent the rest of the flight working through every episode they had available. I've since watched many more from my couch. I've recommended DIRT to friends. Friends whose taste I trust have recommended it to me without knowing I was already a fan.
That's worth sitting with for a second, because it's not how brand content is supposed to work. A clothing company made a show that people voluntarily watch on their televisions, talk about with their friends, and seek out the way they'd seek out a new season of something on Netflix. And it's not a niche phenomenon.
Huckerrry's YouTube channel has grown from 10,000 subscribers to over 125,000. Individual DIRT episodes regularly pull 100,000 to 600,000 views, with the most popular — a trip to a North Atlantic surf oasis — crossing 2 million. These are 20- to 30-minute episodes, not 60-second reels. Even a rough estimate makes the scale of attention concrete: DIRT alone has accumulated somewhere north of 10 million total views across its run. At an average episode length of around 25 minutes, that's in the neighborhood of 4 million hours of watch time — for a single show, from a single retailer. Add in Huckberry Homes, Shop Class, Type 2 Fun, and Gear Lab, and the total climbs higher still. People are sitting on their couches and giving this brand hours of their undivided attention, voluntarily and repeatedly. That kind of time builds something an Instagram ad never will. And here's the stat that really lands: 75% of Huckberry's YouTube audience watches on a television. Not on a phone during a scroll session. On a TV, in a living room, the way people watch Netflix.
The commercial payoff is just as striking. Customers who engage with Huckberry's content have a lifetime value 3.5 times higher than those who arrive through a paid ad or affiliate link. That's not a brand awareness number. That's a business model.
Huckberry — the 14-year-old men's outdoor and lifestyle retailer — is projecting roughly $200 million in revenue for 2025, growing at just under 20% year over year for five consecutive years, bootstrapped and profitable. The company has never taken venture capital. And its founders, Andy Forch and Richard Greiner, have decided that the best use of 15% of their marketing budget is producing episodic television for YouTube.
This isn't a content marketing play dressed up in better language. It's a business model decision — and the logic behind it tells a story about where brand-building in outdoor is heading.
DIRT launched in 2022 and has become Huckberry's flagship show. The premise is simple and endlessly renewable: host Josh Rosen — co-founder of Saturdays NYC, former pro snowboarder, the kind of person who seems to know everybody everywhere — travels to a new place each episode, meets the people growing, catching, or cooking food, and gathers ingredients for a meal.
The show has gone to Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Alaska, Atlanta, Texas, New York City, and dozens of points between. The production quality is high enough that Huckberry is currently shopping DIRT to Amazon and Netflix — and the series already plays on all United Airlines flights.
But DIRT isn't the whole story. Huckberry has built a small portfolio of shows, each mapped to a different corner of the brand: Huckberry Homes (houses and the people who live in them), Shop Class (craft and making), Type 2 Fun (adventure with a knowing wink at the suffering), and Gear Lab (product breakdowns with the designers behind them). A six-person in-house video team produces all of it.
What makes this more than a well-executed content strategy is how explicitly it connects to commerce.
Forch has been refreshingly direct about why Huckberry doubled down on video: rising customer acquisition costs on Facebook and Google.
That's the economic pressure sitting behind every DTC brand's spreadsheet right now. The platforms that built the DTC era — Facebook and Instagram ads, Google search — have gotten progressively more expensive as more brands compete for the same audiences. For a brand like Huckberry, which grew up on those channels, the math was getting worse every quarter.
The response was to build an owned acquisition channel — one where the audience comes to you because they want to, not because an algorithm served them an ad. YouTube was the bet. And unlike a brand awareness campaign that might pay off in vibes someday, Huckberry's YouTube strategy has a direct commercial architecture.
Here's how it works: the product calendar drives the content calendar. When one of Huckberry's house brands has a fall collection themed around Maine, the DIRT team goes to Maine. The talent wears the key looks. Those same looks appear on the e-commerce site and on the mannequins in-store. The funnel runs from entertainment to aspiration to purchase without ever feeling like a sales pitch — because the content is good enough to stand on its own.
This matters because Huckberry's owned brands — Flint & Tinder (rugged), Wills (refined), and Proof (ready for the outdoors) — drive 55–60% of revenue. The shows don't just build the Huckberry brand. They build the house brands that generate the majority of gross margin.
Most outdoor brands that invest in video content are doing something subtly different from what Huckberry is doing. YETI makes films that win at Banff. Patagonia produces documentaries that drive environmental petitions. Salomon TV runs like a niche sports network. All three are excellent at what they do, and we'll dig into their strategies in Part 2 of this series.
But those brands use content to build brand equity — cultural positioning, mission amplification, community infrastructure. The ROI is real but indirect. It shows up in brand consideration surveys, in cultural relevance, in the intangible warmth that makes someone reach for your product instead of the competitor's.
Huckberry is doing something more direct. Their content is a customer acquisition channel with a measurable funnel. Entertainment → audience → commerce. The shows aren't supporting the brand. The shows are the business model.
That's a meaningful distinction for every brand manager reading this. It's the difference between "we should invest in content because it's good for the brand" and "we should invest in content because it's cheaper than Facebook ads and we can prove it converts."
In August 2025, Huckberry opened its first permanent retail store in Washington, D.C., followed by Chicago in November. The plan is 2–3 more per year. And the stores are built as extensions of the content universe.
Walk into a Huckberry store and you'll find '80s-era TVs playing the shows. Listening walls with curated audio. The physical space is designed to feel like stepping inside the world the content created — the rugged-but-tasteful, curious-but-grounded, adventure-adjacent lifestyle that DIRT and Huckberry Homes have been building in viewers' imaginations for three years.
This is where Huckberry's model converges with something our audience already knows well. Rapha built its brand around clubhouses — physical spaces that were as much about the culture as the product. The difference is that Rapha's clubhouses came first and content supported them. Huckberry built the content universe first and is now building retail spaces to match. The stores are physical manifestations of a digital brand world, not the other way around.
The industry noticed. Forch and Greiner were named to the Glossy 50 for 2025 — a recognition that typically goes to founders of much larger companies. The citation specifically highlighted the content-commerce model as the differentiator.
And Huckberry's ambition is growing. The shows being shopped to Amazon and Netflix aren't just about distribution — they're about proving that brand-funded entertainment can stand next to premium streaming content. If DIRT lands on a major platform, it doesn't just extend Huckberry's reach. It validates an entirely new model for how outdoor and lifestyle brands can build audiences.
The most important thing about Huckberry's model isn't Huckberry. It's the economic logic underneath it.
Customer acquisition costs on paid social are rising across the industry. Every outdoor brand — from Hoka to Arc'teryx to On — is feeling the same pressure. The brands that grew fastest on digital ads are the ones most exposed to rising costs on those platforms.
Huckberry's answer — build entertainment people actually want to watch, wire it to your commerce engine, and own the audience relationship — is replicable in theory. In practice, it requires something most brands aren't set up to deliver: content people actually want to watch. Not product videos with a cinematic filter. Not brand manifestos over drone footage. Shows that people choose to watch on their television on a Friday night.
That's a high bar. And it raises the question: among the brands on our watchlist, who has the storytelling DNA, the creative infrastructure, and the strategic patience to build something like this?
It's a question worth examining — because the brands that figure it out won't just be building marketing. They'll be building a moat.
In Part 2, we'll look at how YETI, Patagonia, Salomon TV, and Arc'teryx have each built distinct content models on YouTube — and what the strategic gap among the growth brands that haven't invested tells us about where this is all heading.
