How Cotopaxi Makes the Most Colorful Gear on the Trail

Anyone who knows outdoor gear can spot a Cotopaxi from way down the trail. It’s usually a jacket or backpack with bright pops of color in wild combinations — but nature helps tell that story. Think about the combo of blue, brown and golden panels on that jacket designed to keep rain and ocean spray at bay; now squint and picture Big Sur. The palette of that place snaps into view: a deep blue sea next to a shaggy brown cliff dropping dramatically to a golden sandy edge. 

That blend of landscape and design is no accident. We caught up with Sara Westbrook, Cotopaxi’s VP of Product and Merchandising, for a look at how the brand draws up its signature style.

When I think of Cotopaxi, one of the things I think is COLOR. Can you share a bit about the company's inspirations when it comes to choosing and combining colors?

It started with backpacks, The Del Dia Collection, and using deadstock fabric at the factory to create one-of-a-kind packs. Del Dia means “of the day” in Spanish. It's the essence of one-of-a-kind. I love the story so much because it really comes down to an individual sewer’s imagination of how to put these colors together in unique ways. The end result was super unique and joyful, and it was nothing that the team had ever seen in the outdoor industry. It felt unique. 

Our purpose and North Star is that we are sort of the outsider in the outdoor industry. The bold, optimistic colors help encourage our community to get out. Having something joyful to look at and to put on your body and see on someone else is part of the journey and adventure. We believe our consumers love to adventure, and they love to go out on journeys, because they find joy in that. We want our color to help evoke that sense of optimism and joy. 

Can you talk about how that has worked for you all?

Yes, Del Dia was also our starting place, and it also allowed our team to look to other places for inspiration as well. To look for unexpected color combinations in nature, art, architectural design, just in travel in general. You can imagine: You go to a new city and realize every building is painted a different color. It's vibrant, it's beautiful—seeing that all together as inspiration to bring back into our designs. We're constantly looking for new places to see unexpected color. I think nature at its core has all of those unexpected color combinations, and so that really is how my team is going out and observing all these different points of inspiration and folding them into our color theory. 

I love that. Can you share an example of how that happens? 

Our team went to Norway for an inspiration trip, and one of the experiences they had was walking through a small town. But this town had a mix of green, rolling hills, but really rocky, craggy sort of mountains. It was a beautiful town, so there were vibrantly colored, yellow buildings set against that sort of steely mix of light grays and dark grays and green. It was part of a color story that we then brought into our fall ‘25 palette. 

I’d love to hear more about how your design philosophy overall and the mission of the organization work together. Can you share more about that?

Yes, we know that the most sustainable products are the ones that last. And they are repairable to maintain that longevity. So all of our products come from remnant, which is like deadstock. It's leftover at the factory—recycled or sustainable materials. So sustainability in our design process is just as important as the functional features we're designing into. We bring it through to every step of our design and product development process. 

We also spend a lot of time focusing on how individual products can be repaired and reused. We have a great warranty and repair team, and we're constantly talking to them about where weak points might be found in the product and where we can change construction so that we actually can make it easier to repair. Then we work very closely with all of our sourcing partners to make sure they align with our mission. We never adopted a sustainability strategy. It's been part of the way that we built products from the very beginning. 

How do you balance the trends of the day and staying true to who you are and want to be? 

We have a very curious team. That’s what I always ask of my teams is to be curious. We're looking for inspiration everywhere. Kind of like what I was talking about with color. I think we do look at trends in fashion and travel and art, and our team is also getting outside and having adventures and traveling. The reason we can stay true to who we are is we're balancing what it looks like in fashion with grounding experience in the world like our consumers do. It allows us, I think, to organically discover and research those more macro and micro events that are influencing our customers. The team is super-curious about everything going on in the world, whether it is trend or fashion and art, but it's important for us to kind of actually experience what our customers are experiencing, so that we can sift through that to say what will be important to them or what will resonate with them. 

There's also the desire that we are looking to have the utmost versatility for our customers. We've always been this outsider in the outdoor industry and we really believe that what we can deliver is product that is incredibly versatile. We want our consumers to be able to do all the things like an everyday adventure, hiking a mountain. That thread and need for all of our products to be that versatile allows us to take what's great from trends. But also take what's great from the experience that we want our customers to have. 

How do you foster curiosity? It’s something that we talk about too. 

I would say as an individual and a leader, I ask a lot of questions. I’ve tried to model the behavior of being curious. Then as a brand and a company, Cotopaxi really encourages our teams to get outside. We call it in the wild time. And it's whatever your wild time is. It could be going to a farmers market. It could be curling up on your couch and reading a book. Whatever it is that you, as an individual, do to fill your cup. It allows us to encourage that curiosity—go and try something new. We give our team space and time to do that. They know that they don't have to think about work. I think that really helps with fostering of creativity—creativity and curiosity. 

Anything else I haven’t asked about that you’d like readers to know? 

One of our core brand and product tenants is that we are the brand that helps encourage consumers into new experiences. Giving accessibility to those types of adventures, it's so important. We really focus on how our products can encourage or take fear out of potentially going on an adventure. I think it's a unique and defining part of where we came from, because we were sort of this outsider-y business within the outdoor industry. We want to bring people into feeling great and to feeling encouraged to have these new experiences.

Awesome. Can you give an example of what that means? 

I think we're doing it through product. We do try to do it through brand as well, which is just how we're talking to the customer and trying to not be so serious. But with product, it really means building product that has the right amount of technical features. Sometimes there’s an outdoor product that is scary, because it's made for somebody who is going to spend the night at the top of a fourteener. That can feel like a product that is ‘not for me.’ Our product strategy really centers around making sure that somebody who has never hiked a day in their life would understand that this product is for them.