REI #OptOutside (2015): the retailer that closed on Black Friday and kept doing it

Where REI was in 2015

REI is a consumer co-operative founded in 1938 in Seattle. By 2015 it had about 143 stores, around 12,000 employees, and a large active-member base. Outdoor retail as a category had been growing steadily through the post-recession 2010s, but Black Friday had become a particularly difficult day for the workforce: long hours, heavy traffic, and increasing competition from Amazon and other online retailers pulling sales away from physical stores.

CEO Jerry Stritzke had been in the role since 2013. Internally, REI had been having conversations about whether Black Friday participation was consistent with the company stated values. The co-op structure gave REI more freedom to make a non-revenue-maximising call than a public company would have had — there were no quarterly-earnings investors to answer to.

The announcement

On October 27, 2015, REI publicly announced that all 143 stores would close on Black Friday (November 27, 2015), that the ~12,000 employees would be paid for the day, and that REI was inviting the public to OptOutside — to spend the day outdoors. Online orders would also not be processed on Black Friday. The announcement video, from Venables Bell & Partners, framed the decision as REI putting its values ahead of the single biggest retail day of the year.

The press response was immediate and large. The story ran on every major US news outlet and across international press. Other brands began publicly supporting the campaign by joining the OptOutside hashtag. Outdoor non-profits and state-park systems organized OptOutside events. The campaign generated roughly a billion media impressions in its first weeks.

What followed in subsequent years

REI made OptOutside an annual policy. Every Black Friday since 2015, REI stores have closed and employees have been paid for the day. The campaign expanded over time: in later years REI used OptOutside to fund volunteer outdoor stewardship days, to support outdoor non-profits, and to promote outdoor access policy work. The hashtag itself has been adopted as a year-round movement by outdoor brands and individuals.

REI long-term performance through 2015-2024 has been mixed in ways that are not all attributable to OptOutside. Membership has continued to grow, but REI has also faced the same retail headwinds as other physical-store retailers (Amazon competition, supply-chain disruption during the pandemic, labor-union organizing efforts at multiple stores in 2022-2024). The co-op has remained financially viable but has faced operational pressures that any single campaign cannot solve.

How RGM thinks about brand-activism campaigns

When clients ask about brand-activism campaigns, OptOutside is the structural example we point to. Three things made it work. First, the action was real — REI actually closed and paid its employees, which is the kind of cost commitment that signals the brand means it. Second, the action was consistent with what REI had always claimed to stand for (outdoor access, employee wellbeing, co-op values), so the campaign did not feel like a stretch. Third, the campaign was repeatable — REI could do it every year, which built it into a recurring brand asset rather than a one-shot.

The pattern is hard to copy if any of those three conditions is missing. Brands that announce a values position without backing it with a real operational cost get labeled performative. Brands whose values position is not consistent with their historical positioning get accused of opportunism. And brands that do the campaign once and quietly drop it the next year get less long-term brand benefit than they would have gotten from sustaining it. We tell clients to think about all three filters before committing.

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