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Face Products

The North Face, Inc. is an outdoor product company specializing in outerwear, fleece, footwear, and equipment. The clothing and equipment lines are catered towards climbers, mountaineers, skiers, snowboarders, hikers, and endurance athletes. more...

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The clothing line is famous for its use on mountaineering expeditions on Mt. Everest and in other extreme outdoor activities. As The North Face has increased in popularity recently, it has become somewhat infamous for its trade in counterfeiting circles and its increase in theft.

History of The North Face

The North Face brand was established in 1968, in San Francisco, California, when Douglas Tompkins and Kenneth "Hap" Klopp created an equipment retail store that eventually acquired the current name "The North Face". This name was chosen because the north face of a mountain in the northern hemisphere is generally the steepest, coldest, and most difficult face to climb. By the 1980s, skiwear was added to the line of products, and eventually camping equipment was added as well. The North Face is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the VF Corporation. Tompkins sold the business in 1998.

The North Face's easily recognizable logo consists of a slightly skewed quarter-circle with two lines running within it. This image is supposedly an interpretation of the famous Half Dome rock formation in Yosemite National Park. Adjacent to the symbol are the words THE NORTH FACE embroidered in large block letters.

Rise in popularity, counterfeiting, and theft

In the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of wilderness chic, The North Face became a well-known brand and its popularity, especially among youth and college students, increased substantially. This popularity may be attributed, in part, to the fact that hip hop stars were often seen wearing North Face jackets in music videos. An upper-end North Face winter jacket currently costs about $500 USD. Due to the high demand for and the high prices of these products, a market developed for counterfeit (illegally replicated) North Face goods. Non-genuine North Face items, which are often sold on eBay or in other nonregulated venues, can usually be detected by their misplacement of logos and the obvious inferiority of craftsmanship. In addition to this, many non-genuine The North Face products are clearly not made of Gore-Tex or HyVent, despite being so marked. This increase in counterfeiting prompted a college student to create site The North Face Guru to warn users about such items.

There are some rumors that much of the perceived "counterfeit" North Face clothing is actually real. Producers outside of the United States who are contracted to make North Face apparel make surplus goods and sell them on the black market. These goods have resurfaced across the world.