4 Ways Outdoor Brands Should Think About Partnerships 🌲

I’ve worked in the outdoor industry since I was 19 years old.

(Quick rundown for those interested: camp counselor, adaptive river guide, partnerships assistant for the Boston Harbor Islands National Park area ((where I learned a ton but realized I’d never have an office 9-5 again if I could help it)), Girl Scouts events/curriculum/camps specialist and guide, wilderness medicine instructor, search + rescue member, trail race director, speaker, communications and campaign consultant, and beyond.)

The connecting thread through it all: building safety, stoke, and stories for under-recognized communities to access outdoor adventure. ❤️

15 years later and it’s Baby’s First Outdoor Retailer! 🥳 My patchwork of past experiences paired with my current self-employed freedom gives me a great opportunity to share nuanced perspectives and spark discussion with others in the industry.

The #1 question I traveled to Minneapolis with was “How can outdoor industry leaders work together in creative ways to bring more communities into nature?” and I’ll share takeaways around those very conversations over the next month.

Today is all about one of my fave topics: partnerships. 🤝 Obsessed with them because partnerships:

• encourage us to share and use resources wisely (e.g. the federal govt can’t fundraise for parks, but their nonprofit partners can)

• amplify new/different voices to audiences who need to hear them

• help under-resourced nonprofits get shit done (e.g. the trail running scholarship between Wild Woman Trail Runs and The Cairn Project)

• lead to unexpected innovation and new use cases

As someone who’s built outdoor partnerships for 15 years and counting (you can hire me! ;) ), I was thrilled to hear the word “partnerships” buzzing around the OR floor all week

Here are my favorite takeaways about outdoor industry partnerships from OR ‘26:

🛍️ Everyone wins when brands partner with local retail stores.

Embarrassingly, as someone who’s fallen in love with mountain biking over the past year, I struggle to do repairs as simple as changing a flat. Both trailside repairs and in-my-garage maintenance are intimidating to me and tasks I dread.

A few years ago, I saw a flyer in Hood River for a women’s mountain bike trailside repair clinic in a bike shop. Today, when I need to fiddle with something on my bike, I think about what I learned that night. AND I think about the products I saw and touched during the clinic.

I was a super beginner back then (it took me years after that to start mountain biking regularly). That was the first time I learned about CO2 cartridges for flat tires. They showed us a CO2 cartridge and we went around practicing using them. Since that was my first exposure to it, the product and brand stuck in my brain as THE CO2 cartridge that I would recognize in a crowded store.

To this day, when I buy CO2 cartridges, it’s the pink and black Muc-Off one that I immediately see on shelves and recognize as the one I’ve physically used myself. A two-hour repair clinic inadvertently created a brand loyal customer for life.

Imagine what could happen for a brand if they sponsored educational clinics in local stores! A brand would cement itself in a beginner or novice’s memory as their go-to brand. The retail store would be recognized as a supportive place to learn new skills and buy gear from. And the athlete or enthusiast feels safer and more confident because they recognize the resources made available to them. A win-win-win! (Not to mention keeping dollars in the local economy.)

There is no marketing spend that competes with being the brand in someone’s hands the first time they do something hard successfully.

Paid posts, billboards, and booths just don’t stand up to an IRL experience that builds confidence and competence.

I want to see more stores partnering with brands for educational clinics and experiences here in my town. In fact I started chatting with an awesome bike industry brand about maintenance clinics because we all know that’s something I really need to brush up on and feel more confident in. (If you’re in the Gorge and you want to stay in the loop, shoot me a message.)

📱 Your creator partners know selling points about your product that you don’t (and can create media about them).

When GG Edwards from Gnara (the pants you can keep on when you squat to pee!) designed her apparel, she pictured customers on a glacier, in a harness, needing to pee. That was the primary use case she had in mind.

Then she partnered with creators and asked for feedback, and discovered use cases she never would have guessed. Adaptive athletes, people with specific medical needs, trail crews, bridge inspectors, somebody who sailed across the world wearing only Gnara bottoms.

Many brands treat creator partnerships as simple (and boring) distribution: here’s the product, here’s a code, please post Thursday! A creator partner is far more valuable to you by sharing innovative use cases that you may not have even designed for. And what they say about that matters:

Because all businesses are now media companies too. Leverage partners who can help create specific, niche, scroll-stopping media.

People in 2026 ask ChattyG and Claudia what gear to buy for their next backpacking adventure. At any moment, a chatbot is synthesizing whatever it can find already written about you.

Which means the media some brands have been defunding for a decade (PR, paid editorial, partnerships with creators), are about to matter more than they have in years. Your ad spend does not teach a language model what your product is for. But creator partners do.

I love the brands who have many partners across niche areas, rather than one generic outdoor influencer. People learning outdoor sports have very specific questions (you should see my search history about wing foiling this week). Niche creators know the specific questions, and that’s the content source that’ll pop up next time someone goes to an LLM for gear recs.

Work with creators to find new use cases and to stand out when folks search for sports tips online.

🚴 Experiences – not gear alone – are what get people into the sport.

Beginners and novices don’t come to a sport with brand preferences. They arrive terrified of picking wrong, doing wrong, and then they hand purchasing decisions to whoever is standing in front of them being kind about it. Just like when I learned how to use CO2 cartridges on my tires.

That person (or store) becomes their default resource for learning more in the future.

That hands-on experience doesn’t even have to be directly related to your product! On an OR panel about connecting with the Gen Z segment of the market, a rep from Red Wing Shoes mentioned that the brand hosts events for teenagers about career discovery and trades. I LOVE that – using a retail space for something not about the product, but that shows that you care about a community.

Retail floors are the cheapest venue for gatherings that leave a mark on novice customers. Novices need ecosystems, not products. A tent doesn’t make somebody a camper, a group that camps monthly does. When you offer clinics, group rides, and store nights, you’re not selling gear to a novice, you’re building the ecosystem that lets her keep going (that may become her go-to ecosystem for the next thirty years). You help a new customer go from “I’m trying to mountain bike” to “I am mountain biking” to “I’m a mountain biker.”

Brands, you already pay rent for a room with your name on it. Use it! In-store presence and events are one of the highest-value, lowest-cost things a brand can offer a nonprofit partner or impact campaign.

Share your space with locals: If a local community group can hold their monthly meetup in your store, you may have found yourself hosting a room full of the exact people you’re trying to reach, on a recurring schedule, forever

🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏽 If your brand can’t write a check, share your network.

True partnership is not charity with a logo slapped on it. Yes, nonprofits need money. But money isn’t always the most useful thing you have to give – your network is! (I swear by this, with my nonprofit experience. Who you know and can connect me with is SO valuable.)

Your network is worth more than a one-time check. An introduction to the aligned foundation, new buyer, or solid press contact can be worth ten times what you were going to donate, but it only costs you an email.

Your employees are part of your network too, and getting staff involved with a nonprofit partner is powerful and underutilized. People stay at companies where the work connects to a greater mission.

And don’t forget the power of a megaphone. Brands can support nonprofits, policy changes, and community leaders simply by amplifying their message. It costs very little to add a blurb to your email blast, repost an IG post, or explain in a blog how a policy change affects how your customers can interact with nature.

The network share of the First 50k Sisterhood is a beautiful, recent example of this.

The Cairn Project needed a scheduled race. They needed somebody who could act as liaison between the race and the non-profit (me!). They needed stats and language to offer sponsors to get them excited about the program. Wild Woman Trail Runs was able to share all of that. They reserved 15 spots in the June ultramarathon. Those 15 women, plus the Cairn Project as a whole, continued to share the story about training for Wild Woman for months. That pointed more and more people to Wild Woman, and we ended up with a record sized field.

Wild Woman got more runners, more publicity, and more women into trail running. And it didn’t cost anything financially. In fact the cohort fundraised over $25,000 to fund future programs for The Cairn Project.

Money talks, but so does access to people with other resources.

Partnerships are one major, often overlooked key to make nature more accessible.

Going back to my Big Question for OR: “How can outdoor industry leaders work together in creative ways to bring more communities into nature?”

Become an IRL resource for a beginner learning a skill for the first time. Ask the people who use your gear about the surprising ways they use it. Lend your network, staff, store, or megaphone to a cause you care about even if you can’t cut a check. Do it all more than once.

Coming up next week: The people the outdoor industry NEEDS to stop overlooking (you probably know a bunch of them).