Ridgeline Outdoor's brand relaunch

Ridgeline Outdoor had been making technical hiking and camping gear since 2014. Their product quality had always been strong. Their brand had never caught up.

The context

The original Ridgeline visual identity was designed in-house with a budget of zero. It had served them through the early years, but by 2024 the company had grown to a point where they were competing for shelf space at REI and Backcountry.com alongside brands with serious visual systems. The identity — a simple wordmark in a utilitarian typeface, a handful of inconsistently used stock photography treatments, no real colour story — was holding them back at the point of sale.

Sprint + web

We ran a Studio Sprint: eight weeks, brand strategy and full identity system, plus a web design handoff (component library in Figma, copy for the new site, photography direction brief for a shoot the following spring).

The positioning work landed in an interesting place. Ridgeline's customers were not the aspirational weekend hiker — they were people who actually used their gear hard, often in conditions that weren't photogenic. We leaned into that: the brand aesthetic became deliberate, functional, almost anti-beautiful in a way that felt authentic to the customer.

The colour palette was built around the actual colours of worn-in gear. The photography direction specified no golden-hour shots, no gear laid out on pristine rocks. Real use, real conditions.

Launch

The web redesign launched four months after the sprint, built by Ridgeline's internal team using the Figma component library we delivered. Conversion from the new site was 34% higher than the old site in the first comparable quarter.

Ridgeline's outdoor retail buyers noted the visual change unprompted during line reviews. Two new accounts were opened in the first quarter post-launch.