Berkeleyside44%
The North Face, once headquartered in Berkeley, closes its last outpost in the city 8%
By Nathan Dalton28%
7/30/2026, 7:30:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 13 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Availability Heuristic, and Representativeness Heuristic, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 12.1% saturation with 71 hits. Analysis detected 316 faulty-reasoning hits from 585 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 17.4% and a BS Rank of 8% (27,490 of 29,795 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 92.30% of the article peer group.
The North Face Outlet on Fifth Street has closed.
The store, which shuttered on July 12, was the last vestige left of The North Face in Berkeley, once home to the company’s headquarters and manufacturing plant.
A request for comment about the store’s closure went unanswered by The North Face’s parent company, VF Corporation.
The North Face was founded as a retail shop in San Francisco in 1966 by Doug and Susie Tompkins, but moved to Berkeley after Kenneth “Hap” Klopp, then general manager of the Ski Hut on University Avenue, bought the company in 1968.
Klopp established the company’s headquarters and factory on Fifth Street, on the site of the recently closed outlet store.
The company built a larger factory on Gilman Street in 1972, where Whole Foods Market now stands.
The Factory Outlet store opened in 1975.
Klopp sold the company in 1988 to the Hong Kong-based Odyssey International, which sold the company in 1994 after filing for bankruptcy.
The Berkeley factory closed in 1993, but The North Face’s headquarters remained in Berkeley until 1995, when it departed for San Leandro.
VF Corporation acquired The North Face in 2000 and moved the company’s headquarters to Denver in 2019.
Ian Appleyard began working at The North Face Outlet in 1987 after his sophomore year of college.
At the time, the store sold what were referred to as “seconds” – products with experimental colors or minor faults that weren’t fit for sale to the general public.
The outlet store was bare bones with most of the products sold out of large cardboard boxes.
“People would just come in and fish around,” said Appleyard.
“And you could walk out with some very interesting colors, maybe some stitching that was poor on a tent, maybe a sleeping bag that had the zipper on the wrong side, and you got a good deal.”
All of the products for sale at the outlet had the “O” of The North Face logo blacked out, which voided the warranty.
But the store was also a place to take gear and clothing that was still under North Face’s lifetime warranty.
A master craftsperson named Lourdes was set up at the back of the shop and could repair or customize any North Face product.
Appleyard forged lifelong friends at the store, not just through the day-to-day work, but during backpacking trips he and his co-workers would take together.
“It was a work hard, play hard environment,” he said.
Appleyard was working for the company when Odyssey took over in 1988.
The new owner changed the look of the outlet store dramatically.
It got rid of all the cardboard boxes, put up white walls and installed slats and racks to display the products better.
Lourdes’ little shop in the back shut down.
And then the factory down the street closed.
The Fifth Street store has been the repeated target of theft in recent years, with organized crews taking tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear on multiple occasions.
Other outdoor outfitters have faced similar problems, including REI, which has been the target of multiple thefts and Cotopaxi, which closed after a “ram-raid” robbery in January.
The North Face still has hundreds of stores across the globe and dozens of outlet stores.
But none of them hold the history of the now blacked-out shop on Fifth Street.
The North Face Outlet, 1238 Fifth St., Berkeley.
Connect via Instagram and Facebook.
Speakers
1speaker14%attributed speech504writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageIan Appleyard
81 attributed words100% of attributed speech20% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.