An Interview with Montane Co-Founder Jake Doxat
Born in 1993 at the tail-end of the golden age of British outdoor gear, Montane has always tackled the fine art of outdoor clothing with a slightly left-field approach.
From their pile ‘n’ Pertex Extreme smock (a favourite with mountain rescue teams) to their groundbreaking Featherlite windshirt, the brand’s unique designs helped usher in a new wave of bantamweight outdoor clothing at a time when the term ‘ultralight’ was very much a fringe concept.
In this interview with co-founder Jake Doxat we delved deep on the brand and the radical ideas behind it…
I know that you met Chris Roffe—who you’d go on to start Montane with—during an expedition to Chile in the late 80s, but were mountains and hiking and everything always part of your life? Growing up in London, I can’t imagine you had the usual ‘outdoor founder guy’ route.
I came to the outdoors late, I think it's fair to say. I was into running in quite a big way—running quite a lot of marathons—but it wasn’t until ‘89 that I got into ‘the outdoors’—when I went and did this thing in Chile. It really changed my life—in fact, it changed everybody's life who was on that trip—it was incredible.
It was an organisation called Operation Raleigh which I must have seen on the six o’clock news or something. I managed to get three months off work and go and do the expedition, and through that I met Chris and I really got into the outdoors, basically because I spent three months in a sleeping bag.
From there I suppose you'd call me a weekend warrior. I would blast up from London to the Lake District and Chris and I would go climbing or mountain biking or whatever, but I’d never say I was an extreme outdoor athlete. Looking back, I think it was probably better for me that I wasn’t, because it means I’m still passionate about the outdoors today—I never peaked or got fatigued with it.
And even back then Chris was making his own gear wasn’t he?
Yes—he had a very humble existence as the son of a church minister in Scotland. I don't know too much about it—I'm not a religious devotee myself, nor was Chris—but his dad was a vicar. They were as poor as the proverbial church mice, so Chris would sometimes make his own clothing. When I first met him, he was wearing a jacket that looked like it was made out of an old tent… and lo and behold, it was!
And around this time you were working in London doing something a million miles from the outdoor industry, weren’t you?
Yes, I worked for Diageo, which was the world's biggest drinks company. I was heavily involved in Eastern Europe when the region was opening up in the beginning of the 90s, basically trying to buy the brands that had become assets of the government under communism. The assets of those brands were confiscated when the communists came in, and they were in the process of being handed back to the families—and we were there trying to buy the brands. We didn't succeed, but I had a wild time living in Yugoslavia for a bit and then traveling the whole time to Poland, Czech and the other countries of the former eastern bloc.
And then I got involved in new product development—creating new brands and trying to launch them around the world. The one that I worked on the most was a rum from Venezuela. So I was constantly flying around with a wonderful lifestyle, but frankly speaking, I was killing myself because I was also running and trying to do my outdoor sports—and it didn't really mesh very well with this lifestyle. There was a lot of pressure to drink a lot and sleep very little.
I can imagine.
I was working all day in a kind of regular office environment, but then because it was the booze industry, I was expected to go out to launches or fashion shows or parties or whatever. So I was really burning the candle at both ends. It wasn’t really sustainable.
Chris, meanwhile, had kind of started Montane. It wasn't really a proper business, but he made the first couple of fleeces in ‘93. In ‘96 I got involved, and then in ‘97 I quit Diageo for Montane. It was Chris, me and two people in a small factory in Northumberland.
That's quite a leap, isn't it?
It was really exciting. I was becoming the master of my own destiny. I was getting a bit fed up, not just with the lifestyle of the drinks industry, but with the politics in the big company. But with Montane, I was free to make my own mistakes.
But it was also a difficult transition because I’d gone from a big salary to zero pay—taking the train up there every week and sleeping on Chris’s floor in his little house in Northumberland. And frankly speaking, we were struggling—it was really, really difficult.
Not many people go from high-flying London jobs to the grassroots outdoor clothing world. What was it about Montane that you thought was worth investing your life in back then?
Firstly, I had a passion for the outdoors—I didn't want to be in the booze industry anymore. But also, I did research, and I simply reflected upon the fact that what was likely to happen over the next few years across the whole world was that we would have more leisure time. It was as simple as that.
Around the time that I quit Diageo, South Korea had just gone from a six day week to a five day week—they went from not really having a weekend to having a weekend. And that was really symbolic of the changes that were happening around the world. Couple that with the interest in health and fitness that was around in the 80s and 90s and it was just obvious to me that the next health and fitness phase would be outdoors. People would have more and more leisure time, meaning they’d do more and more outdoor sports.
And then the mid-to-late 90s was a much more optimistic environment, frankly speaking, than it is today. People thought that anything was possible.
Everyone was looking to the future. Everything had that Tomorrow’s World vibe.
Everything was optimistic. The only little niggle on the horizon was that we all thought the world was going to end in 2000.
That pesky millennium bug!
Yeah—consultants made us absolutely paranoid. I think the management consultancy firms netted something like $5.8 billion in fees—just consulting people on something that never even happened. But it was a good time.
Montane was quite a forward thinking company. What were you trying to do differently back then?
The big thing for us was pile and Pertex. Back in those days, we really only had our Extreme products. They had a heavy outer shell of Pertex with a polyester pile lining. It was a completely revolutionary approach to outdoor clothing. Even at that time, it was all about the traditional outdoor clothing system—base layer, fleece, shell. But our big thing was pile and Pertex, which is a system that you can just use directly on your skin—you don't have to have layers. And then when you get too hot, you vent it. It was a very different approach to outdoor clothing.
Did people take to that? Did it take a while for people to get what you were doing?
We were so small that all we needed was 100 people to buy a jacket and we had a good week. In the early days, it was mountain rescue teams, private expeditions and things like the British Antarctic Survey, placing small orders for very specialist users. Obviously, we hoped it would have massive popular appeal, but it never really became a big thing, being as niche as it is. What it did do though was lead us into other more revolutionary, and let’s say mainstream ideas.
Like the Featherlite stuff?
Exactly. The link between pile and Pertex and then Featherlite doesn't seem completely obvious, because the Extreme series jackets were relatively heavy pieces by themselves, but because you only wore them, it was actually a lightweight system. And it was a very fast moving system because you didn’t have to stop, take it off and put something else on when you were out on the hill.
So although the pieces were very different, conceptually they were the same idea—what can we make to enable people to go lighter and faster at whatever they're doing? And that's where the whole ‘Further. Faster.’ thing came from. For the mountain rescue teams and the polar explorers we were selling to, it was about going as far and as fast as possible, so that became our mantra.
I suppose once you have something like that, it gives you a purpose.
The more constraints you have, the easier it is. Funnily enough, on that very subject, back in the early days, we used to buy excess rolls of fabric that were going cheap from Pertex or whoever. They would say, “Oh, we've got 500 yards of Pertex Microlight that’s pink with blue spots on it. Do you want it? It's a third of the price.”
We'd buy it and we'd find that actually some of our best products would come out of those fabrics. We only took them because they were available cheaply, but they forced the designers to come up with something really creative by using something they wouldn't have necessarily chosen.
It’s an instant limitation.
Yeah. So once we had this design brief or mantra or whatever you want to call it, that’s what really propelled our growth—along with the fact that we closed our factory. People really jumped to immediate conclusions about why we did this, so I’ll try and clear that up now.
What were people saying? That you were skimping on costs?
Yeah—people rolled their eyes and thought that we were profiteering, but the reality was quite different. This was back in the late 90s…
Looking at old outdoor labels, that seems to be the time all the UK outdoor brands moved production overseas.
You're exactly right. So we were a tiny business up in Northumberland. We depended upon there being other bigger companies in making clothes in that area—I’d describe it as, “We ate from the crumbs falling off their table.” The whole infrastructure of making garments requires there to be some scale, we didn't have that scale on our own, but then all the factories started closing—and progressively we found it more and more difficult to hire people.
People just didn't want to work in these factories, but at the same time our demand was growing and we simply couldn't meet it. We ended up having to go to an agency to find a factory offshore that could help make it for us—and it was actually a lot more expensive, because we had to ship the fabrics out. Pertex were in Padiham, near Burnley—so we were shipping fabric from Padiham all the way to Asia to make these very lightweight, simple garments. The product cost us twice as much as it did when we made it in the UK, but at least we could make it.
That was kind of the end of the road for British technical manufacturing. Pretty much everybody shut down at the same time.
What was the feeling between all the British outdoor brands back then? Was it camaraderie, or competition?
I think with the British brands, we were always really friendly. We always had good relations. We still do, actually.
I suppose you were all people who just liked the outdoors. I imagine there was a bit of common ground?
Yes, we were at the very end of the golden era of British outdoor clothing. There was Rohan, Berghaus, Rab, Mountain Equipment and Karrimor—and we were right at the tail end of those illustrious brands created by enthusiasts.
Was there an element of ‘who are these kids’ when you first turned up? Like you say, you were the youngsters on the scene.
Yeah, and we liked that, actually. We had a sort of punky approach to it. We didn't give a shit what people thought about us. And we always made sure that we made the most noise at trade shows. We tried to take advantage of that underdog position that we had, and we made sure that no matter what happened every season, we'd produce one or two things that we knew nobody would buy, but the buyers would just love seeing.
The Eight Smock was one of them. We sold some, but it was more of a wow factor thing that people would marvel at. There were loads of others actually—but that stuff isn’t very well documented. There was one jacket that instead of having a zip closure, it had a roll-bag closure at the front—it was this crazy stripped-down waterproof thing. We would always push the envelope a bit.
How did being a British outdoor brand affect the designs? British outdoor gear always feels different to American or continental stuff.
One thing is that British people are more inclined to go out in bad weather. On the continent, if the weather's bad, generally speaking, people just don't really go out. So we had to design gear for people who were actually using it in bad weather.
In Europe, with the continental weather systems, there's more predictability in the weather, so people are prepared to wait for a weather window, but in Britain you can’t wait for a weather window, because it might never happen. We're a small island nation that's exposed to the Atlantic, and weather changes quickly. I could try and make it more about ‘British grit and determination’, and maybe there's a bit of that, but I think it's more just to do with the weather.
So if you're in Britain and you're designing outdoor clothing, you kind of know what the context is and you just create stuff that suits your local environment—it's just implicit.
Nowadays the idea of ‘ultralight’ outdoor gear is becoming more and more prominent, but with your Featherlite stuff you were pretty early on that. Is it kind of validating to see that concept becoming more widely understood?
Yes—in the very early noughties, we used to call ourselves ‘Montane Featherlite Clothing’. That really helped define us, but we abandoned it around 2009, because we realised that we were sort of painting ourselves into a corner.
If you say you're ‘Featherlite Clothing’, then what happens if you want to make a backpack? Or a pair of gloves? Or something that because it needs to be heavier, isn’t ‘featherlite’? So that’s when we came up with ‘Further. Faster.’—that kept the vision, but meant we could do anything as long as it enabled the user to go further and faster wearing it or carrying it or whatever.
But the ultralight thing is kind of obvious isn’t it? When you think about it, who would ever want something to be heavier? It's sort of obvious that you would want things to be as lightweight as possible. And then you want it to be breathable, because that means you're going to be more comfortable. And you want it to be versatile as well, because the more versatile it is, the more things you can use it for.
And as it happens, there's a sort of happy coincidence here that if you design something to be lightweight and you reduce the features down to the bare minimum of what’s needed, then the chances are that's going to be a more versatile piece as well, because it's the overabundance of features that makes it more specific.
As soon as you take features off, all of a sudden, you can use your lightweight hiking windshirt for running or for cycling or whatever. That doesn't apply to everything, but certainly for some products, and that was a real benefit.
That’s interesting. Function is often kind of characterized by features—like, “Look at all these pockets and zips!” but maybe simplicity can actually make something more useful.
Yeah—and it's the same in other fields of product design. When I had my first VCR from Sony it had 150 buttons on it, but who’s the most successful in consumer electronics? Apple—and they don’t even use buttons. It’s the same with everything—look at the interior cockpit of a modern car compared to a sports car from the 1950s—it's a million miles away. It's the same design ethos that's happening in outdoor clothing as well. It stands to reason, doesn't it?
And I suppose that lightweight, minimal thing kind of leads into the trail running stuff. When did that come around? I know fell running has been around for years—and the same with orienteering—but I can’t remember when I first heard of ‘trail running’.
I think it was around 2008 or so that it first really took off. I think I bought my first trail shoes around then. And I'm not sure when Inov8 first hit the scene, but it must have been around that time—prior to that you had Walsh and the stuff for fell runners—but it was around then that it began to be branded as ‘trail running’.
We sponsored the Lakeland 100 for the first time back in 2010 and that was probably one of the first really big UK trail running races. People had been doing it before in other countries, but it really took off in this country around the second half of the first decade, I'd say.
I think it was a transition from hiking in a way. I remember when I was doing a lot of Monroe bagging or in the Lakes on the weekends, we used to walk up and then run down—and we used to wear running tights—but we never considered ourselves ‘fell runners’. And then we’d notice that maybe someone was actually running up as well—and so it just sort of morphed—with people who did hiking and people who did running, just combining those two things.
We were making lightweight clothing for people who hiked and climbed mountains, and we knew that some of them might break into a stride and they were going as fast as they could—it just needed a label put on it.
That makes sense. I suppose you had hikers who were going faster, and then road runners who were going onto rougher terrain, and the two kind of met in the middle.
And there were a lot of people like me who did both. So I was a runner who did a lot of hiking and I used to run a bit when I was hiking—it was a combination of those two things. We always used to say that people only have one gear cupboard at home—so they want things that cross over.
I was down in Argentina recently—and I did a three day hike with my daughter—I wasn't running at all, but had a running windshirt with me because it's just a stripped down, ultra-minimalist, lightweight piece of kit. It's just a brilliant thing to have in your backpack. You never know when you might need it—you may not use it at all, but because it only weighs 60 grams, it doesn't matter that you've got it in your backpack. So things aren’t black and white.
And that extends to normal life too—like how mountain-ready outdoor gear is then used for walking the dog down a canal towpath.
Yeah—you want your clothing to be comfortable. You want it to be as lightweight as possible. You want it to deal with your sweat if you're going to be sweating. You want it to keep you warm. It's not difficult, really.
After over 30 years of Montane, are the fundamentals of making outdoor clothing still the same?
The basic approach is still the exact same as it was. There have been so many attempts at really extreme innovation—I remember there was a jacket that had a hand pump so you could inflate your jacket and create more or less insulation, depending upon the temperature. And then we’ve had numerous attempts at jackets that have built-in heating systems, and all sorts of attempts with reflective materials on the inside.
But these ideas have never really gone anywhere. The core materials are the same as they were 30 years ago. It’s fleece, it’s knitted polyester, it’s wool, it’s breathable waterproof membranes, it’s down insulation, it’s synthetic loft insulation—those things are pretty much unchanged. The materials might have got slightly better, or maybe they’re combined in different ways—but these things have stood the test of time.
Looking in the back pages of 90s outdoor or mountain bike magazines, there’s a lot of small clothing brands that started out around that time that aren’t around now. What was different with Montane? What did you do differently?
I think we came up with a strategy that was good, clear, simple and successful, and it stood the test of time. We came up with an idea that was differentiated compared to the other British brands and it resonated with the times. We had this lightweight, breathable thing and we stuck with it—we didn’t constantly change.
Yeah—those early concepts are still there today. Looking back on all this—is there one Montane product that kind of sums it all up for you?
It’s between the Featherlite Smock and the Extreme Jacket really. The Extreme was where we started and that’s what set us running, and the Featherlite was just so simple and conceptually different to everything that was around. That was the thing that set us on the road to success, really—up until then we were just bumbling along—things weren’t stellar—but then things exploded when we came up with our first super lightweight products. We were about seven years in, and that was the turning point. So yeah—I think I’d say the Featherlite.
Thanks to Sam Waller for the interview.
