The Power of Opting Out: What Skipping Black Friday Actually Signals
Four premium outdoor brands sat out Black Friday 2025 entirely. A new benchmark of 19 brands shows what that silence bought them and what the other fifteen risked to compete on a number nobody will remember by January.
Every November, the outdoor industry runs the same experiment on itself: how deep can we cut before the discount starts undoing the brand. It is a live test of Black Friday brand strategy, run in public, in front of the same shoppers, every single year.
A new ShopVision benchmark tracked 19 outdoor and technical apparel brands across 13 weeks of Q4 2025: when they launched, how deep they went, and which products they were willing to touch. The split it found is worth a reflection. Fifteen of the nineteen launched before Black Friday even arrived. Four ran no discount at all, opting out of Black Friday altogether. That is not four brands that forgot to run a sale. That is four brands making a calculated bet that silence is worth more than the sales it costs them.
The Discipline of Absence:
What Makes Opting Out of Black Friday Credible
Skipping the discount only works as a signal if three things are already true.
The credibility has to already exist. #Norrøna did not simply skip #BlackFriday; it replaced its homepage with a statement: "Our kind of Black Friday... At Norrøna, we don't believe Black Friday is the right direction." That line only lands because Norrøna has spent decades building the kind of durability story that makes the discount feel unnecessary. A brand without a clear communicative positioning making the same claim would read as an excuse, not a distinct position. Read: First Line Sportswear: Global Winning Game Strategy and Playbook
There has to be something to fill the space. #Patagonia did not leave a blank page where the sale would have been. It ran "Our Black Friday" and used Cyber Monday to tease a "2045 future arrivals" concept instead of a percentage off. #Rab held a single product hero across the entire window with no on-page offer at all, treating the moment as a launch sequence rather than a discount event. Both brands understood that opting out of the sale still requires giving the shopper something to look at.
The stance has to hold over time, not just for one season. #Haglöfs has run a decade-long anti-Black Friday position, giving the day "the cold shoulder yet another year." Its only markdown, 20% off accessories and tees, went quietly to email subscribers and was never posted publicly. That consistency is what turns a single year's decision into a brand trait a customer can rely on. It is a communicative position, held in the same shape year after year, or it was never a position at all.
The Sameness Trap:
What the Other Fifteen Signed Up For
The Power of Opting Out: What Skipping Black Friday Actually Signals
Here is what the fifteen brands that did discount were actually competing inside of.
Across the same six-day Black Friday to #CyberMonday core, the 19 brands in the ShopVision set sent 137 marketing emails, 22.8 a day. "Up to 30% off." "Final hours." "Ends tonight." Strip the brand name off most of them and they would be interchangeable.
A shopper who sees "up to 40% off" from four different brands in the same week has no reason to prefer one over the others based on the number alone. The number is not the story. It never was.
When the mechanic becomes a commodity, the discount stops doing the differentiating work. The identical ceilings, the identical urgency language, and the identical six-day window—that is the exact bind the four opt-out brands never had to negotiate. They were never in the room where the number was the argument.
There is a longer reason the number was never going to carry the argument on its own. In The NXT Outdoor Consumer, Above The Clouds' own research into what actually moves this shopper, price and persuasion are the smallest drivers in the field. The audience that decides on the number alone is not the audience outdoor brands are building toward. It is shrinking fastest exactly where the next decade of demand sits. Read: Why Do People Choose One Brand Over Another? And how you could create your own Brand strenght Matrix.
The Gap This Leaves for 2026 Planning
Nearly a third of this peer set sat at the no-discount or no-Black-Friday-label end. That clustering matters more than the individual decisions. It means a visible chunk of the premium segment has quietly agreed that discounting is table stakes for challengers and beneath the brands that don't need it.
It is the same math Above The Clouds has argued before: only 5% of buyers are in market at any given moment. The discount fight inside all 137 of those emails was staged for that 5%. The other 95% were deciding who to trust long before Cyber Monday's subject line reached their inbox, and a Black Friday performance built entirely on the number never reaches them at all. We need to create value, to earn value.
Which raises the real question for 2026 planning: if you share a shopper with Norrøna, Patagonia, Rab, or Haglöfs, does your own Black Friday activity read as confidence, or does it read as the gap those brands are deliberately leaving for someone else to fill?
Opting out costs short-term revenue. What it buys, when it is earned, is a brand story and brand trust that outlasts the sale and a shopper who was never going to be won on the discount number in the first place.
If 2026 planning is already on the table, this is the conversation worth having before the calendar makes the decision for you. If you find this interesting, I would be more than happy to explore ways I could support you in defining your position in the mind of the consumer, creating a winning game strategy, or planning a concept or campaign.
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