At the end of 2024, we tried something new. We ventured into the world of grown-up adventurewear with the release of our Adult All-Season Sweatshirt. In some ways, this felt like a totally natural progression: I’d been dreaming of having some First Peak gear for myself for years, and creating a matching set based off our best seller felt like a great holiday release.
On the flip side, releasing a product for adults was a new frontier. Beyond the design questions of style, color, and fit were questions about the market: who would be buying our adult sweatshirts? What sizes and colors would they be most interested in? How often would these be purchased in a “set” with a matching kids’ sweatshirt?
Our new-release process
With so many open questions, I leaned on our trusted experimental approach to designing new products. Here’s what that looked like:
- Sample early, and test thoroughly: we created an initial sample of the adult sweatshirt in my size, and I lived in it for weeks. I had friends try it for a few days at a time. I washed it, ran in it, slept in it, spilled on it.
- Conduct a pre-sale: to get a better sense of customers’ size and color preferences, I opened up a pre-sale with a significant discount. These early shoppers gave me helpful signal on customer distribution and informed by production order.
- Test various channels: holiday season was the perfect time to test this release because it allowed me to see customer response both online and in-person. I got to practice and experiment with how to fit an adult garment in with the rest of the line.
- Start small: as excited as I was about this release, I knew that starting with a small production run was the right move for the business. I ran a limited batch of adult sweatshirts, and was able to completely sell out within 6 weeks of launching!
Iterative design
Part of the fun of sampling a product (before mass production) is giving yourself the freedom to be nitpicky. When it came to my sample sweatshirt, I focused closely on each little detail, in an effort to build my ideal garment.
Here are the primary design changes we made between v1 and v2 of our adult sweatshirts:
- Change the color: for what it’s worth, the color of the original sample was never intended for prime time. It was simply a dye test so I could see how the product shrunk and changed during our garment dye process. That said, seeing a wrong color helped me think about what “right” could look like. I knew I wanted to release a black option — something classic and neutral — as well as 1-2 options that could be direct matches with the kids’ line.
- Fix the fit: the sample we ran was intended to be a unisex Medium, but after testing it myself and with friends, it was clear that it wasn’t quite big enough to be a Medium. I preferred releasing an oversized style to an undersized one. We changed that size down to a small, and corrected the other sizes accordingly.
- Adjust the design details: there were a set of small details that I adjusted too. I shrunk the logo by .5” in diameter to make it a more natural fit on the left chest. I widened the neck binding and shrunk the neck hole to give the sweatshirt a more snug fit.
With these edits, the production version of our sweatshirts was a much more polished product! And even so, I’m excited for additional tweaks I’ll make based on customer feedback on the next run. I’ll slightly tighten the wrist cuffs; I’ll release 1-2 additional colors; I’ll order more small sizes, and explore an XXS option (that could also work for older kids).
Business assessment
I gave it away above, but the launch of adult sweatshirts was a success! We sold out the entire run within just a few weeks of opening sales, and adult sweatshirts were our 3rd highest grossing product for the year. Additionally, we saw about 10% of adult sweatshirt customers coming back to purchase additional sizes and colors – the response from the community was emphatic.
Additionally, I saw how shoppers responded to the parent-child sets at multiple holiday markets. Customers were so excited to purchase the sets as gifts, very often opting for direct matches. The adult sweatshirt line also welcomed non-parents to First Peak: many of our market customers were adults who couldn’t resist our sweatshirts after feeling how soft they were. While the rest of the line was irrelevant to these shoppers, they still resonated with the mission of creating sustainable clothes, built for adventure.
What’s next
With all you’ve read, it’s probably no surprise that our adult sweatshirts will be back in 2025! I’m still deciding whether these will remain a special holiday release, as opposed to joining the line more permanently. If you’d like to see more of our adult sweatshirts, or if you have feedback on what we’ve already produced, please reach out!