The PULSE - Q+A With European Outdoor Group
In the outdoor sector, a product failing isn’t just disappointing – a tent or sleeping bag that stops keeping the weather out is a safety issue. How has that shaped how your members think about durability?
OCTober 01, 2026
The PULSE: Q&A with European Outdoor Group
Dr. Sophie Bulman, ESG Project Manager, European Outdoor Group
Dr. Katy Stevens, Head of ESG, European Outdoor Group
In the outdoor sector, a product failing isn’t just disappointing – a tent or sleeping bag that stops keeping the weather out is a safety issue. How has that shaped how your members think about durability?
Sophie: For the outdoor industry, durability has always been fundamental to good product design. Our members create products that must perform in demanding environments, often over many years, so longevity is about more than extending a product’s useful life, it is also about maintaining performance and protection. This fits naturally with the move towards circularity.
A product cannot truly be circular if it is not robust enough to withstand years of use, repair and potentially multiple owners.
Reflecting the strong interest across our membership, the EOG has established a dedicated Durability Working Group to explore durability, longevity and how these can be assessed across outdoor products.
Our research found that when a garment disappoints, more than one in four consumers simply leave the brand – and only 5.9% ever return the item. What are your members seeing about how customers respond when a product doesn’t live up to expectations?
Sophie: Outdoor consumers have high expectations of technical products that they often invest in and expect to use for many years. When something goes wrong, how a brand responds can therefore be extremely important to maintaining that customer relationship.
Across the EOG membership, we see a strong focus on keeping products in use through repair. Our recent Circularity Survey found that nearly 80% of responding brands offer a repair service to customers. Rather than a fault or failure automatically signalling the end of a product’s life, repair gives brands an opportunity to restore performance, extend product life and maintain trust with their customers.
Europe is moving to make durability and material disclosure legal requirements through ESPR and the Digital Product Passport, which is exactly what the consumers we surveyed said they want. With regulation and consumer expectation pointing the same way, what does that open up for brands?
Katy: Emphasis on durability and transparency is important, and can lead to better product, but more information doesn’t automatically mean better decisions.
Firstly, durability is fundamental to outdoor products: they need to protect the wearer from environmental conditions, and so durable materials and construction techniques is the norm, albeit from a performance and protection, and not a sustainability perspective.
Materials disclosure is more complicated, simply knowing which material is used doesn’t necessarily tell you whether it is a better or worse product. Where disclosure can be particularly valuable is in helping consumers distinguish between better choices within the same material category, for example, recycled rather than virgin polymers. There is still a considerable amount of work to be done to help consumers interpret that information and understand the trade-offs between material choice, performance and longevity.
You’re talking to members right across Europe as they prepare for these changes. What’s the biggest shift you’re seeing in how brands approach product longevity and what should the rest of the world be watching?
Katy: The biggest shift is from knowing that we make durable products to being able to measure and demonstrate that durability. Outdoor brands have always designed for longevity because performance depends on it, but quantifying what “more durable” actually means is challenging.
There is still relatively little guidance on how durability should be defined and measured across very different product categories, and no single metric works for everything. So the industry is chipping away at that challenge: developing test methods, understanding how testing relates to real-world use, and building the evidence needed to substantiate durability. What the rest of the world should be watching is how we turn something we’ve historically understood through performance and experience into something that can be measured and communicated credibly.