More than six years ago, I wrapped up a similarly rare post on this very blog with a realization that, in hindsight, seems incredibly obvious.
When I was looking for a job throughout 2018, desperate to find a way out of journalism and out of my present situation, I fed myself a spoonful of bullshit about how it didn’t matter what company I worked for or what type of product it created, “digital content management is all the same regardless.” Now that I work with a product that I have a keen personal interest in, I realize how wrong I was.
And the employee discount doesn’t hurt either. I just wish we sold more closet space.
Now, of course it’s easier to go to work every day if you give a shit about the thing you’re working on. This was true from 2018 to 2022, in my first ever role outside of journalism after almost a dozen years on newsrooms.
Incidentally it was also true of my next role, when I ended up working on the marketing team at a small company that sold the type of legal cannabis products that had offered relief from the nerve pain that lingered after back surgery in 2022. I may not have known the first thing about the science of cannabinoids prior to accepting that job, but I sure do now, and I was exceedingly familiar with their therapeutic benefits, and it was easy to write about them from a largely experienced point of view.
This time around, though, it’s a little different. I mean, sure: in a former life, pre-parenthood and pandemics, I was somewhat more of an avid hiker. I wouldn’t say I was an every-weekend-on-the-trails kind of guy, but when presented with the opportunity (and a ride to the trailhead) I was at least enthusiastic about a few miles in the outdoors, particularly when it ended in a great view and a summit beer.
But earlier this month I found myself truly in awe not only of how easy it is to show up for work for a company I’m interested in, but how humbling it is to put in 40 hours a week under the banner of a brand you can literally see from the airport to the top of Everest and everywhere in between.
And today, somewhat remarkably, I checked off my first anniversary at The North Face.
As far as “aspirational places to work” goes, this was always high on the list, even for a kid who didn’t see snow until he was 28. I’m not sure what my first moment of awareness of the brand was, but I’m relatively confident I never owned anything with the half-dome logo on it until I worked at Finish Line, and even then it was a jacket intended to keep me warm on a weekend of drinking beers in Chicago in December rather than in a line for a ski lift.
My awareness of The North Face was born entirely from a streetwear perspective. While the brand may have been “born on the rock” and outfitted expeditions from Everest to Antarctica and other far-reaching, hostile environments on Planet Earth, it also had been given a second life via its adoption as a hip-hop fashion staple in New York City in the 1990s and 2000s.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, smack a bitch in the face, take her Gucci bag and her North Face off her back.”
— The Notorious B.I.G., “Dead Wrong,” 2005
But despite my understanding of its cultural clout, a kid from subtropical Brisbane, Australia had no need for a 700-fill down coat, much less the money to pay for one. Even when I moved to the northeast 13 (!) years ago as a comparatively skinny 28-year-old, Maine-based L.L. Bean was a much more financially sensible (and locally approved) option.
When The North Face’s parent company, VF Corp, announced over the summer of 2018 its pending move to the capital city of Colorado, I was on the breaking news desk at The Denver Post. When the press release hit my inbox, my initial reaction was “uhh…what’s VF Corp?” I dutifully posted a bare-bones story at 5:06am without really understanding the implications, but once I did some cursory research it was an eye-opener to learn that The North Face was part of its portfolio.
I remember thinking, “huh. That’d be a cool company to work for someday,” and going back to LinkedIn to keep hammering away at my already-lengthy job search.
A few short months after that, I landed at Finish Line and probably set the wheels in motion for my current role to even be feasible. But make no mistake: Over the next two or three periods of job-hunting, I kept my eye keenly peeled for roles at VF, largely in a brand-agnostic manner, but my application history (which is freely available in my employee dashboard, troublingly) is heavy with TNF jobs.
The closest I got to getting my foot in the door at VF was with the running brand Altra in 2021, when I got to the end of the process as a final-two candidate for a copywriter role that I was certain was the final piece of the puzzle that would bring the family back to Denver from Cincinnati. It didn’t pan out (obviously) but the recruiter I worked with ended up being the person in charge of managing candidates for the gig I ended up getting.
Candidly, I spent my first three months at The North Face switching between deep imposter syndrome (I’m surrounded by all these world-class athletes and hardcore outdoorsmen, while I barely even hike anymore, and I don’t do snow sports or trail running!) and utter confusion at what the job actually entailed, because I didn’t feel like I was doing very much.
I came from more than 15 years of jobs where I had a very clear set of daily deliverables which had to be done because I was the only person assigned to do them. By contrast, I almost went on more company-sponsored camping trips in my first quarter than I worked on copy projects. They say a lot of truth is said in jest, and I said in jest multiple times that I felt like I really hadn’t done anything in the early months since beginning.
But the deeper I got, the more I started to understand that the role was less about grinding out product copy (there’s definitely some of that) and more focused on being a facilitator or connector between all of the teams who sit within the product development organization but appear to not speak to each other as much as maybe they should.
This happened to be right up my alley, because I could lean on my “new guy who doesn’t know shit” status to ask the most entry-level questions in an effort to understand how everyone else’s jobs work, how they interact with mine and how I might be able to make life easier for everyone. And, as usual, people love to talk about what they do (or, more accurately, the annoying parts of what they do), so most folks have been glad to elaborate.
This all came to a head right around my fifth month in the job. The brand hosted a quarterly town hall in the cafeteria at the office, streaming it live to all of our offices and partners around the world. The agenda included recognizing five folks who were celebrating career milestones of five years or more of service and giving them the opportunity to publicly shout out someone who had had a positive impact on their work or projects or the business at large.
I sat down in the cafeteria with my teammates, trying as best I could to follow the stream of Business Words that I still haven’t fully adjusted to, eight years after leaving journalism. I had only worked with one of the five milestone employees being recognized, Kyle, so most of the ongoing conversation was like water under the bridge to me. When it was Kyle’s turn to deliver his shout-out, he made reference to the fact that the person in question hadn’t yet been with the brand six months, and I kind of chuckled to myself and thought “huh, just like me.”
Then the words “technical copywriting” hit my ears and everything went real quiet. Fuck. FUCK. It’s not “just like me.” He’s talking about me.
I effectively blacked out and couldn’t hear anything other than my own heart pounding in my ears. When he wrapped up by saying my name, the room started clapping and the people around me turned to smile and congratulate me. I just about had a heart attack…and it only got worse, because I was summoned up onto the stage in front of the team around the world to accept my shout-out.
Of all the days to wear a loud pair of Nike Dunks.
Like I said, I was basically blacked out. I had to go back and watch the recording of the live stream the next day to make sure I hadn’t put my foot in my mouth or made an absolute mess out of the 30-odd seconds I had the microphone in hand. Thankfully it was endearingly nervous, jokey enough, and deferential to my teammates’ efforts. Adding an extra layer of surreality, a smooth dozen or so folks congratulated me in the hallways over the next few days, and others still have brought it up in the ensuing months if we hadn’t crossed paths until now.
While my professional style has almost always been to remain aggressively humble to the point of self-deprecation, a lot of my downplaying of the relative importance of the role stems from being unable to truly fathom how much impact even the smallest improvement can have when you apply it across a global brand of this size.
Since early July 2025, I’ve been chipping away at a project whose scope is so enormous I had no idea where to begin thinking about it, much less breaking it down into workable chunks. Even if I could have worked out how to do that, I was brand-new to the brand and the nuances of the product line may as well have been written in hieroglyphs. But with some really strong guidance and hand-holding from one of my teammates, all those spreadsheets and notes and meetings coalesced in a few thousand words’ worth of content that I sent off for legal review in late March.
Around the same time, I was texting with a friend who asked me how the job was going and whether I’d found my groove. I mentioned the project I’d hit a milestone in and, in the midst of explaining it to him, the immensity of the work dawned on me for the first time. To me, it was very basic copy in a spreadsheet, painstakingly agonized over for weeks and months to make it make sense. Zooming all the way out, that same very basic copy will be attached to every single piece of apparel the brand sells all around the world, beginning in September 2027.
Not just the store at the mall in Denver, not just in the U.S. If I ever get another chance to visit a brand-owned store in another country, my work will be on display (and subsequently thrown away after purchase, if we’re being very honest).
Finish Line was acquired by JD Sports shortly before my tenure there began, and JD is an absolute giant in the sportswear retail market in the United Kingdom and Europe, but it has less cultural recognition or traction in the U.S. market. The North Face, by comparison, is a truly global brand, and this is the first time I’ve worked on a product that has such enormous reach and recognition.
Case in point: Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to spend a week visiting the brand’s European headquarters in Switzerland and two of our stores in Milan. It goes without saying that everything in my luggage carried the brand logo, but what was equally mind-bending is that I couldn’t go anywhere in any capacity without seeing it.
Walking down the jet bridge at Newark to board my flight to Italy. On rainy street corners in Milan. Waiting on a platform in Lugano for a train to the office. A ball cap on a street vendor. No matter where I was, seemingly every time I turned my head, there was someone else with the Half Dome embroidered or screen-printed on their backpack or jacket or hat or T-shirt.
It feels like I’ve lived several lifetimes over the past year, since I first set foot through the door at 1551 Wewatta. Gone is much of the imposter syndrome I carried into the job as a long-retired hiker, oft-injured runner and never-before skier (not that I’ve skied now), and I’ve become much more confident in my understanding of how the work comes together, who to ask for help or guidance when I need it, how to advocate for my point of view.
But even after the first 12 months it’s still incredibly surreal to look around at an all-hands meeting and see the logo on everyone’s right shoulder, or sit in a meeting to learn about upcoming product, or scroll through Instagram and see archival pictures of Everest expeditions with climbers on top of the world wearing the very same brand I now fill out spreadsheets for.
That’s pretty good motivation to keep showing up. Long may I be allowed to.
Crawfin' USA 