The North Face
Never Just a Hike
You hiked today. You just didn’t call it that.
Because a hike isn’t just distance. It’s a process of change. With every step, the hike changes: temp drops, terrain shifts, perspective widens. Earth, rock, bark, snow… sometimes even steel and concrete… layer together in new ways, turning movement into composition. You don’t just move through the landscape. You shape the experience, and it shapes you.
We were asked to help tease out The North Face's plan to takeover the word Hike and redefine it through visual storytelling in social-first moments. The content we captured would be leveraged to create disruption across social media - taking over TNF channels, posting new definitions, and causing confusion and yes, a bit of rage baiting to tell the viewer, you don’t know shit about hiking… but you will soon.
To break the common definition of hiking, we concepted scenarios that would depict hike-type moments of movement and discovery beyond the "trail"–from the heart of the city to climbing crags to snow-capped ridges.
From our scenarios, we scouted locations across unique environments and produced a multi-day shoot for still and moving content capture. With considered design elements that evoked movement and conveyed the idea that hiking is happening in more places and in more activities than common knowledge would assume, our imagery appeared across several verticals in The North Face's social channels.
