#PIT VIPER SUNGLASSES WHITE OUT PROFESSIONAL#

It has also drawn some top-notch athletes to join the brand as Key Players-Mumford and Garcin’s term for their brand ambassadors-setting them apart from bigger, more established (and more expensive) performance eyewear brands like Oakley and Smith. This pairing of practicality with unabashed authenticity has been tremendously powerful for Pit Viper. Trends are more micro now than before there’s way less of a monoculture.” It’s coming back in various pieces of clothing, and you can see the inspiration in celebrities and different influencers. “It’s just the right timing for the right audience of nostalgia,” says Polivy. Full-coverage sunglasses not only bring in retro style points, but also serve an important function.”Įvan Polivy, chief strategy officer at fashion brand consultancy Stateless, points out that Pit Viper’s throwback vibe falls nicely in line with Gen Z’s current Y2K leanings. The return of the fanny pack or bum bag in skiing and mountain biking is a prime example. “We are seeing a return to some elements of retro fashion where there is still function. “They are killing it in the outdoor industry,” says John Entwistle, director of content strategy at outdoor-focused branding agency MMGY Origin. The pair has turned taking nothing seriously into a serious business. The glasses were bright and playful, immediately signaling a good time. By then, Mumford says, he’d grabbed a few more pairs, hand-painted the frames neon colors, and dubbed them Pit Vipers.

When he returned to Salt Lake, he showed the sunglasses to Garcin, who immediately offered to make a website so the duo could sell them to other skiers. He spent the next few days skiing in his surplus shades. “I put them on and was like, ‘This is a look I need. On a 2011 trip to Wyoming, Mumford lost his shades, and in a pinch, picked up some all-black, military-grade, wraparound sunglasses at an army surplus store. Garcin had a marketing job, had bought a house, and was renting out nearly every room to help him cover the mortgage.

#PIT VIPER SUNGLASSES WHITE OUT PROFESSIONAL#

Mumford was working in a Salt Lake City ski shop and competing on the professional free-skiing circuit while sleeping in his van. In their first few years out of the University of Colorado in the late aughts, Mumford and Garcin were living paycheck-to-paycheck working in the ski industry, chasing snow. From January to August 2023, the company’s Instagram feed registered 1.39 million interactions among the brand’s 900,000 followers. It also allowed the company to pull $262,000 in sales during a minute-long flash sale during Cyber Monday in 2022. “It’s this organic desire to share the humor.” The urgency Garcin and Mumford cultivated in their customer base to keep the joke running is what garnered $2.5 million in revenue in a single day after a post-holiday restock in February 2021. “We want to engage people to the point where they feel like they want to show Pit Viper to someone else,” says Garcin. In 2021, the founders even used humor to take a serious stand against some far-right extremists who wore Pit Vipers to storm the US Capitol on January 6, posting that Pit Vipers are for “extreme sports, not extremists, losers.” Browsing the company’s social media feed means easily losing 20 minutes to posts of Pit Viper-wearing seniors flipping the bird, pictures of people wearing Pit Vipers on the toilet, and videos of people doing moronic tricks on skis, bikes, and rollerblades wearing not much but Pit Vipers. The lowbrow humor is strong with Pit Viper.

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