How LOGE Camps built a Hospitality Brand for People who want to Get Outside but Stay Inside

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LOGE Camps offer lessons for building brands capitalizing on the great outdoors trend, imparting a sense of place in their brand experience experience, and hiring mission-aligned employees to scale a brand experience

Who will love this

• ⛺️ People with more outdoor gear than sense (hi, it’s me)

• 📆 The adventure planner in the group chat

• 📈 Outdoor brands who want to capitalize on the post-pandemic outdoor renaissance

• 🛒 IRL retailers

Today

I love the outdoors. But I also love a shower. 

My favorite holiday ever: running between rifugios (mountain huts) in the Dolomites. A character building day running trail (or clinging to via ferratas) plus a hot meal. BELLISIMO.

I digress.

Here’s the thing. The pandemic changed us: we got back to nature in a big way, and it’s one of the things I think we’ll see more of in 2024. Proof 👇

• 🏕️ Camping booking service Hipcamp nearly doubled its listings since 2019, and bookings grew sevenfold in that time (Source NYT)

• 💸 Outdoor category revenues are up 24 percent on pre-pandemic times (Source: The State of Fashion 2024)

• 🧥Trade activity for outdoor apparel brands Salomon, Arc’teryx and The North Face is up 800% on resale platform StockX (Source: The State of Fashion 2024)

But let’s be honest. Lots of people love being outside. Not everyone loves sleeping outside.

Today’s brand is instructive for: brands building their position through collabs, people thinking about how to brand a physical space, and brands who want to build a sense of locality.

LOGE Camps are a niche hospitality brand that started in 2017 with a single property in Westport, a surf town on the coast of Washington. Today they have 6 properties and 14 in development.

Pull up a stump 🪵 let’s get into it.

Three Ways LOGE Camps Build their Brand

1. Good Brand Company

No brand exists in isolation from culture, other brands, or its audience. The brands your brand rubs metaphorical shoulders with (whether you’re stocking them or working with them in official collabs) is a creative platform that can strengthen and extend your brand. When you don’t have a lot of existing brand equity, this strategy can do a lot of heavy lifting: you’re borrowing equity from the brands you’re hanging out with.

The best brand partners are:

• Brand aligned (similar ethos)

• Aesthetic aligned (aesthetic connection)

• Culturally aligned (make you relevant and current)

LOGE keeps company with other outdoor brands like RUMPL, Miir, YETI, Kammock, and Biolite. What all these brands have in common? They’re all luxe outdoor brands. Bang on target for LOGE’s target.

Remember: The brands that you associate with signal your values. 

2. Community: Act Local

How do you build a sense of local-ness as a brand new IRL space?

It’s easy for a brand to claim “we’re about community” but…what does that even mean? 

LOGE optimize for a sense of local community by partnering with not-for-profits and artists who share their values and let them borrow cred to make community and outdoor claims. This move has a dual purpose: it brings new audiences to LOGE, and builds goodwill and equity for LOGE as an environmentally and community minded brand.

3. Hire Co-Creators of your Brand Experience

Your people are the embodiment of your brand. How you hire can be a filter for finding the right people.

Early hires set the tone for the business. In a business delivering experiences (fitness studios, hospitality), customer-facing folks play a critical role in building your brand: they’re a touchpoint and a representation of your brand. Barry’s and SoulCycle are masters at this. LOGE’s career page is the perfect example of a young company being ultra clear on who they’re for and why they exist: hiring folks that fit this description will bolster their brand.

Three things to love & learn from 📚

1️⃣ Make a wishlist of brands in your universe that amplify your brand positioning. If you’re branding a physical space, choosing the brands you work with is a perfect opportunity to signal your values. It’s all in the details. If you’re a sustainable hotel for example, stock interesting, eco-conscious soap (heyyy Dr. Bronner’s).

2️⃣ Brand experience non-negotiables. Location is critical to LOGE Camps success, making people feel they’re having a local experience is part of their secret sauce. Define the non-negotiable pillars of your brand experience that you’d want to keep if you were to scale 10x, 100x, 1000x. What remains the same?

3️⃣ Write a job description to attract brand evangelists. In my opinion writing killer job descriptions that describe a company’s mission is one of the most useful skills a founder or a young brand can add to their toolkit. Goal: attract people who buy into the mission and can help scale it. Practice by writing a job description that talks about the types of people you’re looking for and the mission you want them to join on.

Let’s build better brands & businesses

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That’s all! ✌️ Thanks for your time.

Amanda

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