Arc'teryx Veilance: Sales Enablement & Product Knowledge

KEY OUTCOMES

CONTEXT

Arc'teryx launched Veilance as a premium sub-brand sitting at the intersection of technical outdoor performance and high fashion. When the first standalone Veilance boutique opened in New York, I was brought on as a founding team member. The boutique was a go-to-market initiative: Arc'teryx needed its retail associates to sell Veilance confidently, but the product was genuinely complex—expensive ($800–2,000+ garments), technically dense, and competing in a crowded luxury space where customers had real objections and alternatives.

The gap was clear: there was no unified training resource that gave associates the brand story, the product knowledge, the competitive context, and the sales tactics they needed in one place. I built it.

THE CHALLENGE

Three things made this hard. First, Veilance’s value proposition was subtle—it didn’t shout. The brand’s design philosophy was “the invisible advantage”: peak performance hidden in plain sight, no visible branding, neutral colors. That’s a tough story to tell at the point of sale.

Second, the product specs were written for engineers, not customers. GORE C-Knit Technology. Down Contour Construction. TerraTex. These meant nothing to a shopper unless someone translated them into benefits they could feel.

Third, associates were fielding real objections—“It’s too expensive.” “Is it waterproof?” “Why not just buy a Moncler?”—and there was no playbook for handling them consistently across locations.

MY APPROACH

I built a comprehensive training deck deployed to retail locations nationwide. The deck was structured as a deliberate learning sequence—each section built on the last—and it covered four distinct PMM functions: brand positioning, product translation, competitive intelligence, and sales enablement.

1. Establishing the Brand Story First

Before getting into product details, I grounded associates in what Veilance actually is. The deck opened with the brand’s relationship to mainline Arc'teryx—shared values like obsessive perfectionism and use of the best materials—then introduced Veilance’s distinct identity: classic menswear inspiration executed with modern technical performance. The key positioning insight was “The Invisible Advantage”—the idea that Veilance stands out precisely by blending in.

2. Defining Who Buys Veilance

I identified five distinct buyer segments based on what I was observing on the retail floor and what drove purchase decisions in practice:

3. Translating Specs into Benefits

This was the core product marketing work. I took the technical specifications from the product sheets and turned each one into a customer-facing benefit—the kind of language that closes a sale.

Beyond the spec-to-benefit translation, I also built a “Devil’s in the Details” section that walked associates through the hidden design elements of each garment—the hardware, the seam placement, the pocket construction—so they could point to specifics when a customer picked something up. The idea: once you see the craftsmanship up close, the price makes sense.

4. Competitive Intelligence

I researched and mapped three direct competitors, giving associates the context they’d need when customers inevitably brought them up:

5. Objection Handling Playbook

I built a structured playbook for the six most common customer objections I’d encountered on the floor. Each one included a concrete response strategy—not a script, but a framework for how to reframe the conversation.

6. Sales Tactics Grounded in the Customer's Experience

The final section of the deck wasn’t about the product—it was about how to interact. I laid out a four-step decision-making framework that mirrored how a high-consideration purchase actually unfolds: learn their needs, invite them to try it on, explain the benefits, empower their decision.

Two key tactics stood out. The first was “wear it yourself.” If an associate could say “I’m actually wearing that piece right now,” it immediately shifted the conversation from salesperson to trusted peer. The second was the hands-on moment: getting the garment on the customer’s body before trying to explain its value. The deck framed this as creating “moments of delight”—surprises like how light a down jacket feels, or how quietly it moves.

OUTCOME

The training deck was deployed to Arc'teryx retail locations nationwide, giving every associate selling Veilance the same foundation of brand knowledge, product understanding, competitive context, and objection-handling frameworks.

This was also the earliest example in my career of a pattern I’d keep returning to: building internal documentation that translates product complexity into actionable clarity for the people closest to the customer. The same instinct—understand the product deeply, figure out what actually matters to the buyer, build the bridge between the two—is exactly what I brought to my later work at Ridge.

PMM SKILLS DEMONSTRATED