Friday Fact Check: Exposing the “crazy hypocrisy” of North Face.

In News by wp_sysadmin

Oil and gas industry trolls North Face with new billboard campaign
Marissa Schultz, Fox Business News, June 3, 2021

The oil and gas industry launched a new ad campaign Thursday against North Face to shine a light on the outdoor apparel company‘s “crazyhypocrisy.”

Chris Wright, the CEO of Denver-based Liberty Oilfield Services, is spearheading the campaign by putting up billboards around North Face’s Denver offices and launching a website and social media campaign, dubbed “Thank you, North Face.”

The idea for the campaign started after North Face denied an order of jackets to a Texas oil and gas company reportedly because the popular fleece maker did not want its outdoor brand affiliated with the fossil fuel business. 

Now Wright is trolling the company in Denver by calling out how many North Face jackets, backpacks and clothing products are made from oil and gas.

There’s “no chance that North Face could exist as a company or an organization without oil and gas,” Wright told Fox Business Thursday. 

Fossil fuels are needed to make the petrochemicals that are used in the plastics, nylon, climbing ropes and more that North Face sells, Wright says. Oil and gas products fuel the factories that manufacture the goods. And fossil fuels are the backbone for shipping North Face products around the world. 

So, when North Face apparently shunned the oil and gas industry by reportedly refusing to fulfill the jacket order for Texas-based Innovex, Wright said the move was the height of “crazy hypocrisy.”

“It’s like bees shunning honey,” Wright said.

North Face did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new ad campaign and why it didn’t make the jackets for Innovex.

The seven billboards are going up around the Denver offices of the VF Corporation, the North Face parent company. One billboard says: “That North Face puffer looks great on you. And it was made from fossil fuels.”

Wright says he hopes the campaign will spark an honest conversation about the role fossil fuels play in the economy as well as climate change, which he says is real. And maybe driving by the billboards will give North Face employees a chance to reflect on how the oil and gas industry makes their lifestyle possible, from the jacket they wear to the kayak they took out last weekend. 

Perhaps North Face will realize their “oil and gas is evil [stance] is kind of silly because my whole lifestyle depends on it, and all the products I enjoy in the outdoors are made out of it,” Wright said. 

Originally tweeted by The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) on June 4, 2021.