KAILAS Skips the Summit Shot and Sells the Partner Who Gets You There
KAILAS built its newest brand campaign around the climbing partners who have trusted each other for decades, not the peaks, and pushed its down-insulated Glacier Traverse line onto digital billboards in thirteen cities.
KAILAS, the Chengdu-based outdoor brand that bills itself as one of the world's three leading climbing-gear makers, launched its "Stay Warm, Stay Together" campaign this past weekend, built entirely around the relationships that keep climbers alive rather than the summits they chase. The campaign features Chengdu instructor Jon Otto and mountaineer Zhang Qingwei, who have climbed together for roughly twenty years, alongside KAILAS athletes Liu Junfu and Zhou Song and the Slovenian mountaineer Aleš Česen, who has built trust with climbing partners across language and culture through nothing but shared technical know-how.
The product doing the talking underneath all that bonding is KAILAS's GT Glacier Traverse line, insulated with goose down rated up to 1,000 fill power and paired with an ultralight ZERO-Gravity shell, aimed at the kind of snow mountaineering where warmth and weight genuinely trade off against each other. The visuals have been running on digital screens in thirteen cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Macau, since late September.
It is a sharp positioning move for a brand still introducing itself to Western climbers. Patagonia and The North Face built decades of brand equity on solitary conquest; KAILAS is betting that the more honest story, and the one that actually sells technical gear to serious climbers, is about who is on the other end of the rope.
Source: PR Newswire
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
