Everything You Need to Know About Who's Winning in the Winter Apparel Space

Introduction

This report is a competitive digital analysis of 5 brands in the Canadian winter apparel space.

We’ll highlight key metrics for each competitor across the digital landscape, then make a comparison to determine which brands are winning and lagging in each area.

Once the winners are determined, we’ll dig into specifics on why they’re winning. This will help us surface actionable insights.

Finally, we’ll highlight suggestions of further research that RightMetric could provide to uncover more specific opportunities to fuel digital growth for your brand.

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Key Takeaways: Recommended Actions

In this section we summarize the most important key takeaways and actionable recommendations from the Competitor Snapshot Report™.

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Key Takeaways

Norrona, Rab and Mammut skew heavily towards serving millennial men while Helly Hansen and Peak Performance are more gender-balanced.

• Recommendation
  (i) Focus on Gen Z women who aren’t being targeted as much by competitors, yet demonstrate strong demand for the winter apparel category.
  (ii) Focus on adventure seekers. They love the outdoors, action & adventure sports and want the best gear for the best experiences.

Helly Hansen spent the most on digital ads at $2.5M followed by Peak Performance ($663K) and Rab Equipment ($113K). Facebook, Instagram and Display represented the highest paid ad spend. 

• Recommendation
  (i) Explore TikTok for paid ads. Not many competitors are running ads on TikTok.
  (ii) Identify what your audience is doing during the summer and consider running a summer campaign to fill in the whitespace period. Competitors are focusing their ad spend during the winter season.
  (iii) Create advertising for women, Helly Hansen and Peak Performance both ran campaigns targeting this demographic

Deal and review websites represent over 69% of the referral traffic. 

• Recommendation
  (i) Work with discount websites to gain consideration amongst budget-conscious audiences and clear out older inventory.
  (ii) Consider sending sample packs to top review sites to inform the clear interest Canadians have in adventure sports.
  (iii) Tap into Canada’s multicultural audiences. 44% of competitor website traffic comes from the Chinese website Dealmoon.

Helly Hansen ($1.5M) is the only brand in the competitive set that is investing significantly in Paid Search

• Recommendation
  (i) Invest in Paid Search. There is currently a white space opportunity, as all brands in the competitive set besides Helly Hansen spend less than $10K per month.
  (ii) Tailor your messaging to distinct outdoor demographics, addressing their interests directly. Helly Hansen, for instance, specifically engages with the skiing and sailing communities in its communication.
  (iii) Add a sense of urgency in your copy for promo ads such as “Limited Availability”, and “Don’t Miss Out”

Competitors are using social media as an awareness funnel with little redirecting back to their websites.

• Recommendation
  (i) Use organic channels with high viewership like TikTok to reach the younger Gen Z whitespace audience segment.
  (ii) Create reels and videos that have an organic feel to them incorporating elements such as humour using popular viral video clips.

Mammut has generated 43M of its 104M total  video views from TikTok. Peak Performance generated 47M of its 69M views from Instagram. 

• Recommendation
  (i) Leverage popular video topics that are outside the normal scope of your brand such as ASMR or compilations which open with a trending soundbite or video to harness virality with new audiences. 
  (ii) Focus on use cases that match the audience white space (women + Gen Z + outdoor activities, and action + adventure sports).
  (iii) Partner with outdoor sport creators and athletes that fit your message and audience affinities.
  (iv) Find an authentic and unique tone for your social accounts. Mammut uses TikTok to experiment with diverse content. 

No brands in the competitive set are leveraging email marketing or referrals. 

• Recommendation
  Fill the whitespace and incentivize pre and post-purchase customer loyalty by following up with email marketing flows that:
  (A) Connect with review and sale sites to refer the budget conscious and pre-consideration audiences to your site.
  (B) Share content around ways they can integrate winter apparel into their lifestyles.
  (C)  Incentivize purchases with discounts, bundles, and D2C purchasing options.

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Personas & Messaging

When looking at what competitors are doing, what can we recommend based on patterns and themes we are seeing across the board?

This section takes our high-level learnings of cross-brand strategies and pulls together key tactics that are reaching specific audiences and potential personas. Suggestions are meant to be delivered in a realistic, simple and direct manner for effective application.

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Personas & Messaging

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Personas & Messaging Whitespace

(i) There’s audience whitespace with Gen Z women that aren’t being targeted as much by competitors, yet demonstrate strong demand for the winter apparel category. 

(ii) There’s a whitespace on TikTok. Only Mammut and Peak Performance have been able to generate a significant following on this platform. Take advantage of this whitespace to target the Gen Z audience. 

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Traffic

When analyzing competitor traffic, we look for growth spikes. 

Once we detect a brand significantly outpacing competitors’ growth, that’s our clue to dig into all that brand’s digital activities to determine which strategies and tactics fuelled the growth. Then distill that into repeatable learnings for you to apply to your brand.

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Traffic Growth

Helly Hansen leads in traffic volume and all brands have grown their traffic YoY.

Helly Hansen is the clear winner from this competitor set in terms of traffic volume, with 5.1M site visits in the past 12 months. However, Mammut and Rab Equipment saw the largest growth. They’ve grown traffic by +30% and +26% over the past twelve months, increasing by 65K and 80K yearly visits. The average growth for the other competitors is 8.3% in the same period.

Peak Performance follows with the second-highest traffic at 454K.

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Seasonal Trends

Leverage the late-Fall and Winter seasons. They see the highest traffic.

Competitors see the most website traffic from October to January when winter sports are happening.  Traffic consistently peaks in November which can be attributed to Black Friday and holiday shopping. Traffic is the lowest in the summer months between May to August. 

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Digital Advertising

When analyzing advertising data, we look at absolute spend volumes to identify winners. Then, we narrow down to each brand and examine spikes in advertising spend and social traffic.

Once we identify which brands are investing significantly in advertising, we look at which platforms they are focusing their efforts on and the top-performing creatives on each platform. Analyzing top-performing creatives allow us to extract effective advertising tactics that are being utilized by your competitors.  

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Advertising Spend (Canada)

Experiment with TikTok. This channel received the highest volume of video views organically. Peak Performance was the only competitor with paid TikTok spend.

Facebook, Instagram and Display received the highest ad spend budgets. 

From January 2022 to December 2023, Helly Hansen spent the most on winter apparel at $2.5M. Peak Performance and Rab Equipment follow at $663K and $113K spent on winter apparel. 

Helly Hansen and Rab allocated 65% and 76% of their budgets to Facebook over the past year, while Peak Performance prioritized Display (43%) and Desktop Video (43%). All competitors except Norrona used Instagram also. 

*Allocate budget across all platforms to reach broader audiences instead of just focusing spend on one platform.

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Seasonal Trends (Canada)

Leverage holiday promotional periods but capture empty periods from January to April.

Helly Hansen is the only competitor that maintains higher levels of spend throughout the year.

Peak Performance spent significantly more from January 2022 to December 2022. 

Rab Equipment leverages the Winter-Spring seasons from November to May as a top spending period.

*Identify what your audience is spending their free time doing during the Summer and consider starting a campaign to fill in the whitespace period where competitors are not spending as much.

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Advertising Creative

Show off your branding while also sharing its durability.

Helly Hansen ran this ad which features a timelapse of a woman standing in the backdrop of mountains while other people hike around her. This is a clever nod towards the durability and sustainability of their products. 

*Connect with your audience through ads featuring the outdoors to inspire adventure. 

Add promo copy such as free delivery to your shopping ads to motivate direct purchases.

Helly Hansen takes advantage of its established brand and runs carousel ads featuring its products. Ads feature a variety of clothing to capture different audiences and motivate click-throughs. 

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Advertising Creative

Excite audiences with your gear in action.

Peak Performance shared this general brand ad which shows still images of their gear in action, with one frame animated to show a man plunging into water in a rain jacket to show its durability. 

*Give prospects the chance to see the quality of your gear through showing its use.

Reach and empower women with your branding.

Peak Performance has women as a focus in this ad with a simple message that dedicates its Trailblazer collection to “female adventure pioneers” and shares that it is designed by women for women.   

*Consider positioning your products to women as all brands presently skew male. Focus on female empowerment and inspiring women by sharing amazing female athletes. 

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Advertising Creative

Highlight your niche in your branding.

Rab Equipment uses its ads to share its brand specialization towards mountain sports such as climbing, pairing imagery of sports with its brand slogan of being the “Mountain People” 

*What does your product make people think about? Reference that in your promotional marketing to build your brand.

Share what is special about your product’s features.

Rab Equipment shares technical features of a running vest in this ad using a combination of product imagery and application imagery. They use a shop now button so that audiences can easily get to a product page from the ad. 

*Help audiences easily understand why your product is superior to others. 

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Paid Search Spend

Continue investing in paid search. It varies greatly between competitors but is maintained for most competitors year-round. 

Helly Hansen ($1.5M) is spending the most on Paid Search followed by Peak Performance ($252K) on ads. Rab Equipment follows with an investment of $56.3K.

Norrona  ($11.8K), and Mammut ($553) saw the lowest paid search ad spends.

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Paid Search Traffic

Helly Hansen generated the most paid search traffic totalling 377K. 

The average CPC of the competitive set is $0.58. Mammut saw the lowest CPC at $0.11. Norrona, Rab Equipment, Helly Hansen and Peak Performance wavered between $0.64 to $0.75 CPC.

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Paid Search Creatives: Helly Hansen

Helly Hansen targets the skiing and sailing audiences with paid search.

Top paid search ads for Helly Hansen in November 2023* use the following tactics:

• Incorporate a sense of urgency in your copy (i.e: Limited Availability, Don’t Miss Out)
• Emphasize the quality and variety of your products
• Target people looking for sales to expand your reach

*Campaign pulled from Helly Hansen’s top spending month in 2023, November 2023

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Referrals

Analyze competitor referral traffic to identify the key drivers behind their visits and uncover potential opportunities. 

Identify the press and media entities that have the most influence over your target audience, and pinpoint the optimal websites for affiliate marketing partnerships and display ad placements. 

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Referrals 

Optimize referrals and make them part of your strategy, competitors are not focusing here as much.

Helly Hansen represents 81% of the referral traffic alone. Referrals are not a strong channel for other brands in this competitive set, generating an average of 15K visits from January 2023 to December 2023.

Top referring websites include: dealmoon.ca (44%), outdoorprolink.ca (16%) and expertvoice.com (6%).

*Canadians are quite multicultural and into deals and samples. Consider offering sale packages to referring sites of your products to introduce prospects to your brand. ‍

Then implement post-purchase marketing emails to follow through.

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Referrals 

Leverage discount and outdoor gear review websites as consideration channels.

Canada’s multicultural demographic has 44% of traffic share being referred by Dealmoon a Chinese discount website. Review websites like ExpertVoice and Outdoor Pro Link offer discounts and free products to people with expertise in their fields, which allows competitive brands to get feedback. Leverage this by offering samples to these sites as a way to validate your products to customers who may still be weary about them.

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Organic Search

As we dissect organic search data, we keep an eye on spikes in competitor traffic and keyword trends.

When a brand outperforms others in organic search, we delve into its best-performing web pages to understand what captivates the audience. By identifying the most impactful keywords, we can decode prevailing content themes and formats, leading us to web content opportunities that truly resonate with the audience.

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Organic Traffic

Helly Hansen is leading the pack in Organic Search traffic.

Rab Equipment and Mammut are seeing the most growth in Organic Search with 253K and 193K of organic traffic respectively in 2023. 

Although Helly Hansen had the highest organic search traffic, it had the highest decrease in organic traffic YoY at -15%.

*Total Organic Traffic (Canada): Jan. 2022 - Dec. 2022 vs. Jan. 2023 - Dec. 2023

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Organic Traffic Growth

Top organic non-branded keywords focus on product benefits and key attributes.

Emphasize the quality and durability of your products by using keywords such as “waterproof” and “performance”. Helly Hansen targeted specific audiences by including keywords such as “hiking” as well as location-based keywords such as “hiking shoes vancouver”. 

*Create blog content about:
i) Guides & Tips: How to care for your products (see this viral video on how to wash a GORE-TEX jacket from Arc’teryx) ‍

ii) Educational Content about skiing or other outdoor activities (i.e: best places to ski)

iii) Behind-the-Scenes content about how your products are made to give consumers insight into the durability of your products

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Social Media

Analyzing competitors' social metrics reveals untapped platforms with high audience engagement and minimal competition. 

It helps identify the platforms that drive web traffic and indicates where to focus your social strategy for maximum reach, engagement, and follower growth. By benchmarking competitors' social media efforts and performance across platforms, you can identify top-performing areas and gain insights to enhance your own social strategy.

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Followers

TikTok is a relatively untapped channel in the organic Winter Apparel Space.

Mammut is the dominant player in the competitive set with a massive social media following of 2M, which is 2x more than the second-largest brand, Helly Hansen, with 1M followers. Peak Performance, Rab and Norrona average at about 379K followers across channels.

Peak Performance and Mammut have the most followers on TikTok, but most followers across most brands are concentrated on Facebook.

*Prioritize TikTok. This audience loves action clips from adrenaline sports. Attribute your brand to the adventure of these sports. 

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Follower Growth

Norrona saw the most relative follower growth with +38% new followers YoY.

Helly Hansen (+153K new followers) and Peak Performance (+152K new followers) experienced the most overall follower growth from Jan 2022 to Dec 2023.

Mammut had the most viral follower growth from TikTok content with 4 spikes in follower growth in March 2023, July 2023, November 2023 and December 2023. They also however lost 264K followers in September 2023. 

*Take advantage of popular niches such as ASMR and 360 videos. Use these to capture the attention of audiences who are not already part of your demographic and increase your reach. 

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Follower Growth

Norrona gained 46K followers in the last 2 years.

Norrona saw a spike in follower growth from September 2023 to December 2023, averaging 5.2K new followers in each of those months, when they generated 4.4M views across 2 videos on TikTok and Instagram. They also generated another 10K new followers from October to December 2022. 

The brand has positioned themselves towards Gen Z, going viral off meme videos and showing athletes skills. 

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Social Traffic

Keep your social media as a top of funnel awareness strategy.

Helly Hansen is the clear leader in social media traffic with 1.1M in traffic from January 2022 to December 2023. Peak Performance came in second at 90K. Both brands had more traffic in 2023 than 2022 with increases towards the winter months of October to December. 

Facebook (78%), YouTube (10%) and Reddit (7%) are top drivers of traffic to web pages.

*A social media approach for the winter apparel industry should focus more on inspiring prospects to get out and have an adventure.

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Video Views

Use TikTok to boost video views and reach younger audiences.

Mammut is leading the pack among competitors with 104M views, followed by Peak Performance at 69M views. Both brands boost their views using TikTok, with YouTube as a secondary platform for Mammut, and Instagram as the main platform for Peak Performance.

All brands have a significant presence on Instagram. 

*Find sport content creators who are representing the best of snow sports. Share what inspires new and old audiences alike whether that’s creating funny compilations, showing off an athlete’s skills on the ski hills or sharing gear demo ASMR.

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Social Media Marketing: Mammut

Leverage social media as a way to bring your brand to life beyond products.

Mammut has 2M followers across their social media but only $2.6K of paid advertising. Here is their strategy:

*Partner with creators to share your brand’s values. Use creators who embody the best of their sport and adventure.

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*Create themes for your videos so they are a series. Mammut shows off its products by creating product ASMR videos. 

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*Go beyond product education and show your brand cares about its audience.  

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Content & Messaging

By analyzing the competitors' content, we can discover unique content opportunities, pinpoint successful production elements and techniques for replication, and identify underperforming themes to sidestep. 

This will guide an effective content strategy for the Winter Apparel audience.

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Top Performing Social Content

Engage viewers with POV footage.

Top-performing POV videos typically feature scenic views, unedited audio (allowing viewers to experience the distinct sounds of a snowboard or ski carving through snow), and impressive tricks and jumps executed on challenging terrain. Partner with skilled athletes to film them demonstrating difficult maneuvers while sporting your outerwear.

1M Views

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1.1M Views

This video features professional snowboarder, Torstein Horgmo

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Be the source of inspiration.

Mammut produces videos targeting adventure seekers and outdoor enthusiasts, pushing the boundaries of skiing and climbing. The videos feature athletes ascending towering mountain peaks and cliffs, highlighting awe-inspiring views from the summit.

6.3M Views

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2M Views

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Top Performing Social Content

Incorporate ASMR and focus on the auditory experience.

Mammut has created a collection of videos showcasing individuals donning their climbing boots, emphasizing the distinct sounds of zippers and button clicks. Consider incorporating similar techniques into your own product promotion, employing foley and ASMR effects to accentuate specific sounds, like the satisfying zip of outerwear being fastened.

20M Views

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1.3M Views

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5.3M Views

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Create educational content. 

Mammut collaborated with Hard is Easy to produce a video highlighting the significance of maintaining climbing ropes. The video showcased a laboratory experiment that compared the performance of a pristine rope with that of a soiled one, injecting creativity into educational material.

4.5M Views

This TikTok video was just a short teaser for a longer 20 minute YouTube video, which was made in collaboration with YouTuber Hard is Easy

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Email Marketing

When analyzing email marketing, we look for growth spikes in email list size, email traffic and send volumes. 

Once we detect a brand significantly outpacing competitors’ growth, that’s our clue to dig into all that brand’s email campaigns to determine which strategies and tactics fueled the growth. Areas we analyze include optimal send times, top-performing creatives, subject line tactics, traffic generation, and landing pages. 

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Email Traffic 

Leverage email marketing, it is an untapped space amongst the competitive set.

While Helly Hansen is the leader in email marketing, it has drastically decreased its focus on email YoY from 2022 to 2023. Rab, Norrona, Peak Performance and Mammut have seen minimal traffic from emails in the last 2 years, averaging less than 5K traffic to their sites.

Brands are not prioritizing email as a communication strategy with their audience base.

*Incentivize post-purchase customer loyalty by following up with email marketing flows that:

(i) share content around ways they can use winter apparel to maximize their fun. 

(ii) incentivize purchases with discounts, bundles, and D2C purchasing options.

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Demographics

When looking at demographics, we analyze site visitors and social media followers.

We analyze the demographics of all brands in the competitive set to determine the average audience demographics and identify any anomalies in the data. This helps us to identify if any brand is attracting an audience that is not being captured by others. 

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Website Demo (Age)

Find your place among the 18-24 year olds, competitors are prioritizing 25-34 year olds.

Peak Performance, Norrona and Mammut have a high share capture of the 25-34 market, while Rab Equipment has a high percentage of the 45+ market.

Helly Hansen has the most even age skew of the competitive set. 

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Website Demo (Gender)

Resonate with the female audience. Most competitors are focused on targeting the male audience. 

Helly Hansen and Peak Performance have the most even gender skew with only a slight male skew. Their messaging and creative contain a balanced mix of female and male models and athletes. Norrona skews male and young with 72.5% of their audience being male. Their messaging is focused more heavily on adventure sports and the environment.