Following a jam-packed Kendal Mountain Festival weekend, Account Director, Tayler Willson, recaps some of the Brandwave highlights, including client activations, snowy excursions… Oh, and a couple of gold medals!
Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat — a saying coined by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the early 1900s, yet never more prevalent than during this year’s Kendal Mountain Festival.
The annual Kendal event, held in the quaint market town within the River Kent’s dale and just outside the Lake District, enjoyed its biggest attendance since its inception 44 years prior, with over 30,000 outdoor appreciators visiting across the four days.
For the Brandwave team, based out of a country house turned HQ 20 miles east of Kendal, this year was once again about nailing client activities, networking with likeminded brands and taking lots of pictures of big coats.
Before the serious outerwear business began, though, this year’s festivities started inside the Mountain Festival’s HQ, front and centre at the GORE-TEX Brand Great (Mem)Brains Pub Quiz 2024 — a quiz described by the American brand as “a showdown between teams of the country’s top outdoor experts.”
Naturally, Brandwave’s eight-strong team — creatively named “Peak Performers” (a nod to the Swedish skiwear label) — reigned victorious by a single point and were duly crowned champions.
This result was not only a display of Brandwave’s in-depth knowledge of the outdoors industry and absolutely everything within it, but also a showcase of the team’s innate ability to name GORE-TEX-clad celebs, early nineties hip-hop artists and solve outdoorsy anagrams.
From there on it was down to business, an agenda that started with a team trail run from Brandwave HQ. The 10km route embraced everything to love about running in the outdoors: clear blue skies, fresh air, a well-timed mountain sunrise and lots of hills.
Once the celebratory quiz dust had settled and the team’s legs had recovered, Brandwave’s attention turned to what it had ultimately returned to Kendal Mountain Festival for: to work with its clients to host intuitive and thought-provoking initiatives, one of which included providing adidas Terrex’s sold-out hikes with top tier Silva navigation.
Brandwave also hosted a ticketed Coffee Bar Live event, an in-person iteration of the popular digital-only networking event the brand created during the pandemic.
Hosted by Brandwave founder Dan Macaulay in cahoots with Merrell, the live-recorded Coffee Bar podcast explored diversity and inclusion in the outdoors in front of an audience and alongside a panel including Marlon Patrice of We Go Outside Too, Lucy Hird and Emily Thornton from Soft Girls Who Hike, and Jonny Quint, Merrell’s EMEA Product & Marketing Director.
That evening, the Brandwave team headed to Sapore, a hidden gem of Italian culinary excellence nestled in the heart of Kendal, where it held its infamous Pizza Party, an invite-only shindig attended by close friends of the brand. All this before a late night boogie inside the nearby Bootleggers Bar to celebrate Osprey’s fiftieth anniversary.
In between hosting duties and working with clients, the Brandwave team also found time to watch some of a plethora of groundbreaking films that were being shown across the weekend.
Team highlights included The Big Sea (directed by Lewis Arnold), Libertad (directed by Luke Hill-Norton) and The Below Zero Session, one of many intimate screenings presented by Montane.
Brandwave rounded out Kendal Mountain Festival 2024 in the most apt way possible: by taking on the Unsanctioned Athletics x GORE-TEX x Sports Shoes Trail vs Road Race on Sunday morning.
As with all Unsanctioned Athletics events, the exact format and finer details of the race were only to be revealed 30 minutes before the start, leaving runners with a limited time to plan a strategy. That means no set course, and no set distance, and a race entirely dictated by the runner.
Our MD, Ollie Robinson, was a part of the race’s five-person winning team, which covered 13km and over 500ft elevation in just under an hour, meaning that the weekend finished how it started: decorated in silverware.
A pretty apt way to round out another excellent Brandwave x Kendal Mountain Festival weekend, if you ask us.
