Outdoor industry layoffs continue as Columbia, Revelyst cut staff

I scored an MSR Pocket Rocket stove as a gift back in 2017, and it has since traveled with me for dozens of nights in the backcountry. It’s seen Canyonlands, Grand Staircase-Escalante a trio of times, the Collegiate Peaks, Eagles Nest Wilderness, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and much more. It reached its 7th birthday this week, actually, and I plan on using it until it completely falls apart.

I am not the type of person who preemptively loads up on gear I may or may not get around to ever using. Until it breaks, or until a vital component gets accidentally left behind somewhere, it’ll be the go-to equipment in my quiver.

It’s probably safe to say I get outdoors more often than the average human, and I’m not actively buying replacement gear for things that I’ve had for 7+ years. For outdoor and sporting goods companies, I am fundamentally sorry for your bottom line – it’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that I don’t need you as often as you’d like.

Just last week I highlighted the headwinds facing the outdoor gear industry, noting that both REI and Cotopaxi had initiated layoffs as they expect sales to continue to wane in 2024. Well, those two companies are far from alone, as today we found out that both Columbia and Revelyst – the parent company of brands like Bell helmets, Giro, and Camp Chef – were going to lay off employees in waves, too.

While I’m sure folks like me are a contributor to that in some way, this is how I’ve operated with my gear for my entire life – and that didn’t stop the boom years these industry titans just had during the COVID pandemic. When you couldn’t go anywhere where other people were for those years, people rediscovered the outdoors in ways they’d either forgotten, or overlooked for years, and the surge in investment in tents and lanterns and coolers and bike helmets and jackets came with it.

The rollback in COVID restrictions naturally meant that people were going to get back to their previous ways of recreating, even if they still got around to getting outside more than they had in a pre-2020 world. That’s not exactly a way to sustain upward trends in sales, however. Pair that with the rampant inflation that we saw on most everything in life during 2023, and it’s hard not to notice the obvious here:

People bought a lot of gear in 2020-2021, and I’d wager that almost all of it is still in pretty good shape. That’s the good news here – a lot of folks have some gear that’s still pretty new to them, and hopefully they’ll get outside and put it to use in 2024.

Unfortunately, financials are always tasked with being forward-thinking, and holding on to your gear for another year doesn’t do a thing to help the bottom lines of those companies that manufacture it for you. And instead of baking that in to their business model, these companies are taking the route of laying off employees and cutting jobs until the good times come ’round again.