Born in the shadows, built for the extreme “Endeavour through adversity” with British performance outerwear brand ThruDark.
California, Vancouver, San Francisco, Oregon – the origin stories of the world’s leading performance clothing brands make for pleasant reading. Their sun-basked playgrounds are an adventure mecca for outdoor enthusiasts where countless stories of trekking, climbing and canoeing have resulted in countless jackets, shorts and tees celebrating halcyon days.
ThruDark’s origin story is altogether more clandestine, its performance outerwear the offspring of cruel nights and harsh days spent operating silently in countries that cannot be named, in conditions and environments too severe for most to bear. Its founders, Louis Tinsley and Anthony “Staz” Stazicker spent years in one of the United Kingdom’s most elite and yet least well known military units, the Special Boat Service. And it is from this dour crucible of elite military service that ThruDark pours its credibility, its authenticity and its excellence upon the performance outerwear industry.
Foundational to ThruDark’s identity and success is its mantra “Endeavour Through Adversity”. An implicit acceptance of the inevitability of difficulty, this mantra manifests itself across both the brand’s product design and content creation. All ThruDark products are designed, developed and tested personally by the brand’s co-founders, utilising all of their operational expertise to create garments that wear well, look sharp and remain fit for purpose and pursuit through thick and thin. From industry leading smart fabrics from established partners such as Dyneema, Polartec, Pertex and Primaloft, ThruDark combines innovative technology with a distinctly unique military aesthetic. Starting with a limited number of extreme cold weather jackets, the range has since expanded to waterproofs, activewear, hot weather gear, utilitarian everyday apparel and more. Product quality aside, ThruDark is known for its own content style and brand image, with a cult following to boot. With iconic, sweeping landscape wides shot beneath torrid skylines, gritty and visceral visuals and sounds depicting man’s battle against the elements from mountain summits to jungles and deserts. The brand’s slick visuals pack a punch with blockbuster content delivered to the small screen. All this harkens back to the brand’s name, “ThruDark” not only means the fortitude to endure difficult times but is a literal reflection of the brand’s origin story, where elite military operations were routinely performed under cover of nightfall.
Accolades have come aplenty in the six short years since ThruDark’s inception. At the pinnacle of design and performance sits the brand’s bespoke “Summit Suit”, designed to survive the death zone on 8,000m+ peaks. The Summit Suit was worn as part of Bremont’s record-breaking “Project Possible” that saw the 14 highest mountains in the world climbed faster than ever before.
TOG Says …
