Legendary outdoor retailer closes last store in California city it called home for decades

The North Face made billions. Berkeley lost its last store.

The outdoor retailer has quietly shuttered its final location in the California city that helped transform the once-small brand into a global powerhouse estimated by analysts to be worth more than $10 billion.

The longtime Fifth Street outlet permanently closed on July 12, ending The North Face’s retail presence in Berkeley after decades.

The storefront has been blacked out, with the iconic Half Dome logo covered and the doors painted black.

The closure marks the end of an era for the city that helped put The North Face on the map.

Originally founded as a retail shop in San Francisco in 1966, the company moved to Berkeley in 1968 after Kenneth “Hap” Klopp bought the business.

He established the company’s headquarters and factory on Fifth Street before opening the factory outlet there in 1975.

The company later expanded to a larger manufacturing plant on Gilman Street before Berkeley’s factory closed in 1993.

Its headquarters remained in the city until 1995, when they moved to San Leandro.

VF Corporation purchased The North Face in 2000 for $25.4 million before relocating the brand’s headquarters to Denver in 2019.

Former employee Ian Appleyard, who started working at the Berkeley outlet in 1987, remembered customers digging through boxes of discounted “seconds,” products with experimental colors or minor manufacturing flaws.

“People would just come in and fish around,” Appleyard told The Berkeleyside. “And you could walk out with some very interesting colors, maybe some stitching that was poor on a tent, maybe a sleeping bag that had the zipper on the wrong side, and you got a good deal.”

The outlet also served as a repair center for gear covered under The North Face’s lifetime warranty before later ownership changes eliminated the in-store workshop.

The closure doesn’t mean The North Face is leaving the Bay Area. 

While its historic Berkeley and San Francisco locations are gone, several retail and outlet stores remain open across the region.

Nor does it reflect the brand’s financial performance.

The North Face continues to grow globally with hundreds of stores worldwide, even as VF Corporation recently posted an adjusted loss of 27 cents per share for its latest fiscal first quarter.

The company’s broader struggles have largely been tied to steep declines at sister brand Vans, not The North Face.

The Berkeley outlet had also become a frequent target for organized retail theft in recent years, with crews stealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise during multiple incidents.

Other outdoor retailers in the area, including REI, have also been hit by theft, while Cotopaxi closed after a “ram-raid” robbery in January.

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