When Chuck Mumford first launched Pit Viper, the Salt Lake City-based sunglass company he founded with college buddy Chris Garcin in 2012, he picked up an old Samsonite briefcase at Goodwill, spray painted it neon colors, and filled it with a bunch of the outrageously bright military-grade sunglasses he’d designed.
“I would take it everywhere I went,” Mumford says. “I was totally ruthless.”
The Pit Viper founders call this “briefcasing,” and Garcin says it’s become a hallmark of their marketing strategy. “You get one party person to say, ‘Hey man, what’s in the case?’ and suddenly you’ve got five people reaching in and trying on glasses.”
The company, which sells wildly colorful wraparound sunglasses, says on its website that it is “serious about taking things less seriously.” The glasses come in adult and kid sizes and run anywhere from $40 to $140, with a range of styles suited for beach sports, cycling, snow sports, and ball sports. The company’s mission, per its website, is clear: “Pit Viper is here to party. Sunrise to sunset, reef breaks to ridge lines, hole shots to holy shit.”
From the design of the website itself (think Windows 2000 on shrooms) to the brand’s social media feed and the ridiculous emails it sends to customers, the Pit Viper experience is an exercise in revisiting the neon-colored, potty-humor-filled, throw-down vibe of the ’90s. (One Pit Viper confirmation email says, “Thank you for shopping at Pit Viper. We are a business,” and includes a link to an absurd video featuring a man on fire running through an office building with every worker at every desk wearing Pit Vipers.)
Having now logged 10 years in business, Pit Viper has about 100 employees and has earned many millions of dollars in revenue. (Pit Viper, as a private company, doesn’t disclose its finances, though in one 2022 Wall Street Journal story the company reported revenue upwards of $40 million that year.) Mumford and Garcin are riding high on a low-tech design aesthetic, dirtbag ski culture, and hard-to-match customer loyalty. Their following includes outdoor adventurers, pro athletes, and weekend warriors. (Extreme skiing pioneer Glen Plake and NFL players Patrick Mahomes and Rob Gronkowski and are among the brand’s high-profile fans.)
Photograph: Pit Viper
The lowbrow humor is strong with Pit Viper. Browsing the company’s social media feed means easily losing 20 minutes to posts of Pit Viper-wearing seniors flipping the bird, pictures of people wearing Pit Vipers on the toilet, and videos of people doing moronic tricks on skis, bikes, and rollerblades wearing not much but Pit Vipers. In 2021, the founders even used humor to take a serious stand against some far-right extremists who wore Pit Vipers to storm the US Capitol on January 6, posting that Pit Vipers are for “extreme sports, not extremists, losers.”
“We want to engage people to the point where they feel like they want to show Pit Viper to someone else,” says Garcin. “It’s this organic desire to share the humor.” The urgency Garcin and Mumford cultivated in their customer base to keep the joke running is what garnered $2.5 million in revenue in a single day after a post-holiday restock in February 2021. It also allowed the company to pull $262,000 in sales during a minute-long flash sale during Cyber Monday in 2022. From January to August 2023, the company’s Instagram feed registered 1.39 million interactions among the brand’s 900,000 followers.
Future’s So Bright
Video: Pit Viper
In their first few years out of the University of Colorado in the late aughts, Mumford and Garcin were living paycheck-to-paycheck working in the ski industry, chasing snow. Mumford was working in a Salt Lake City ski shop and competing on the professional free-skiing circuit while sleeping in his van. Garcin had a marketing job, had bought a house, and was renting out nearly every room to help him cover the mortgage. On a 2011 trip to Wyoming, Mumford lost his shades, and in a pinch, picked up some all-black, military-grade, wraparound sunglasses at an army surplus store.
“I put them on and was like, ‘This is a look I need. This is me,’” Mumford says. He spent the next few days skiing in his surplus shades. When he returned to Salt Lake, he showed the sunglasses to Garcin, who immediately offered to make a website so the duo could sell them to other skiers. By then, Mumford says, he’d grabbed a few more pairs, hand-painted the frames neon colors, and dubbed them Pit Vipers. The glasses were bright and playful, immediately signaling a good time.
“Pit Viper was a skiing term we were using,” Mumford says. “We’d hit jumps and it would be like ‘pit viper style.’ We were a crew out there, always having fun and trying not to take anything too seriously.”
The pair has turned taking nothing seriously into a serious business. “They are killing it in the outdoor industry,” says John Entwistle, director of content strategy at outdoor-focused branding agency MMGY Origin. “We are seeing a return to some elements of retro fashion where there is still function. The return of the fanny pack or bum bag in skiing and mountain biking is a prime example. People need a place to keep their stuff. Full-coverage sunglasses not only bring in retro style points, but also serve an important function.”
Evan Polivy, chief strategy officer at fashion brand consultancy Stateless, points out that Pit Viper’s throwback vibe falls nicely in line with Gen Z’s current Y2K leanings. “It’s just the right timing for the right audience of nostalgia,” says Polivy. “We’re seeing that in fashion. It’s coming back in various pieces of clothing, and you can see the inspiration in celebrities and different influencers. Trends are more micro now than before; there’s way less of a monoculture.”
This pairing of practicality with unabashed authenticity has been tremendously powerful for Pit Viper. It has also drawn some top-notch athletes to join the brand as Key Players—Mumford and Garcin’s term for their brand ambassadors—setting them apart from bigger, more established (and more expensive) performance eyewear brands like Oakley and Smith. Garcin and Mumford have made a point of tapping people who are deeply rooted in their communities and sports, including Nascar driver Toni Breidinger and pro mountain biker and para-athlete Paul Basagoitia.
“They find athletes that aren’t afraid to be themselves or be the first,” says Breidinger, who was the first Arab American female driver in Nascar. Basagoitia agrees, noting that he’s been with the brand for two years and appreciates that the focus isn’t on his competition record, but his ability to reflect the brand ethos: “They aren’t scared to be a little edgy. They’re a throwback, but they’re innovating as well. They aren’t afraid to break the rules.”
Garcin and Mumford have structured the business in a way that’s aligned with their punk-ass ethos. Reliant on organic, slow growth, Pit Viper is a far cry from a venture-backed startup. And their instincts to “grow” are always supported by the need to perpetuate the hilarity underpinning the Pit Viper brand. For instance, the company built out an offshoot called Shitty Hats, and the website for the side business sells exactly what it promises. Garcin and Mumford built the estore as a joke, but they kept it running as a legitimate business simply because it allows them and their staff to channel more potty humor into their product offerings. It’s a further reflection of what the founders call “Party Mountain” and the total embodiment of Pit Viper’s MO.
Photograph: Pit Viper
From a brand design standpoint, the Pit Viper team is fully committed. There is almost no touchpoint of the Pit Viper brand experience that isn’t dripping with the company’s voice and feel. Every detail is a hilarious iteration of life on Party Mountain. Taking shape over this week’s Thanksgiving holiday is the 12 Days of Turbo, a promotional event that allows customers to “enter to win wild shit.” There are different prizes up for grabs each day, including a stretch limo, a three-day heli-skiing expedition, a three-wheeled Polaris Slingshot motorcycle, an $8,000 gold brick (in a Mumford-painted briefcase, of course), and a Ford F-350 PowerStroke Diesel pickup truck that’s been covered in Wrangler jeans. (Yes, actual denim.)
This is exactly the Pit Viper hustle, and it’s been baked into Mumford and Garcin’s process from the start, never missing an opportunity to proselytize the Party Mountain vibe. Even the most minute details get a wash, rinse, and repeat in a marketing strategy carved from the duo’s decade-long devotion to total ridiculousness. “Nothing can be a stock answer,” adds Mumford. “I never put that briefcase down. I lived it and never turned it off.”
