The Ski Shop That Deleted Its Own Stores and Won
In 1984 it was a rental counter on St. Denis Street. By 2016 the last store was gone and the whole company lived online. Here is how two employees bought the place and turned closing stores into the plan.
In most retail stories, the day the stores close is the last chapter. At Altitude Sports it was the pivot that made the company. The Montreal retailer started in 1984 as a rental counter on St. Denis Street, added one of Canada's first outdoor e-commerce sites in 1999, and by 2016 had shut its final storefront - not in defeat, but because physical retail had shrunk to about 2% of sales. What was left is now one of the country's leading outdoor e-commerce businesses.
The through-line is a single sentence the company repeats like a creed: life is better when you spend more time outside. Everything downstream - the brand mix, the membership, the giving program, even the decision to run a magazine - reads as an argument for that sentence.
01Two employees, one buyout
The modern company traces to 2011, when two longtime friends and roommates who worked at the shop - Alexandre Guimond and Maxime Dubois - bought it and became majority owner-operators. They had bonded early over a shared obsession with technical apparel, and they ran the business the way obsessives do: by listening to what the community actually wanted. Early on that meant urbanwear. As two distinct customer groups emerged - people who lived in the city and people who lived for the mountains - the assortment stretched to cover both.
Life is better when you spend more time outside.
Under the two owners, the business has roughly doubled in size every two to three years. In 2018, BDC Capital came on as a minority shareholder to help fund that growth - a quiet Canadian expansion story rather than a venture-funded sprint.
That ownership structure matters more than it looks. Because the founders are operators rather than a rotating executive bench, decisions that would read as risky to a public retailer - such as walking away from stores while they still produced revenue - could be made on conviction. The pace has been steady rather than explosive, and the company today employs somewhere in the range of 300 to 400 people, most of them working on merchandising, logistics, technology and customer service rather than retail floors.
02What it actually sells
At its core, Altitude Sports is a curated online marketplace. It resells premium outdoor and lifestyle brands - Arc'teryx, Salomon, The North Face, Canada Goose, Fjallraven, Osprey - across running, hiking, camping, cycling, skiing and travel. In 2019 it widened that to a marketplace of more than 400 brands, and the same year it launched its own label, Vallier, designed in Montreal to fuse technical outdoor construction with everyday urban essentials.
The product philosophy the founders describe is unfussy: offer the best to the customer, and sell things that look as good as they are made. That is also why the same Arc'teryx jacket can be sold to an alpinist and to someone who only ever wears it to the office. Instead of choosing between the mountain and the city, Altitude Sports built its identity on the overlap. It is a bet borne out by the numbers - fashion accounted for roughly 75% of sales in 2025.
The catalogue is not only about big names. In 2016 the company worked with Quartz Co. and Monark on a parka insulated with milkweed - the fluffy fibre from the plant - a small experiment that says a lot about how it approaches product. Curiosity about materials, willingness to test an odd idea in public, and a preference for gear with a story are recurring themes. Vallier extends that instinct inward: rather than only reselling other labels, the company puts its own point of view into parkas, merino sweaters, oxford shirts and chinos designed for a commute that might end at a trailhead.
03Who it is really for
The customer Altitude Sports describes is a specific person: someone who folds the outdoors into an urban life. Runners, cyclists, hikers and campers who also need to look presentable on a Tuesday. The company frames this as two communities - city and nature - that increasingly overlap in the same wardrobe. Expert advice is part of the offer, not an afterthought; the site and its content are built to help a buyer choose between technically similar products, which is the hardest part of shopping for gear online. Roughly 97% of revenue still comes from Canada, which makes the brand something close to a default for a certain kind of Canadian shopper.
Where the revenue leans (2025, approximate)
04The membership that never renews
The clearest expression of the company's loyalty thinking is its Lifetime Membership. It costs $34.99 CAD, paid once, with no renewal fee. In exchange, members get 5% off nearly every purchase for life, free returns within Canada, early access to sales and priority customer support. The math is deliberately simple, and it flips the usual subscription logic: instead of charging every year, Altitude Sports charges once and then works to keep you long enough that the discount pays for itself many times over.
We are proud to say that we are a Canadian business, and we are very successful.
Sitting alongside the membership is Alti Dollars, a loyalty currency pegged one-to-one to the Canadian dollar. They do not expire, and they can be spent on future orders including items already on sale - a small detail that removes the usual anxiety of points programs.
05A retailer that also gives, prints and films
Since 2017, the biannual Alti Action program has let members donate to partner non-profits and receive Alti Dollars in return. The partners are outdoor-facing by design - WWF Canada, Protect Our Winters Canada and the Trans Canada Trail - and the program has raised over $580,000 for the outdoors. In 2021 the company formalized all of this with B Corp certification, giving its environmental and community claims an external audit rather than a marketing line.
It also behaves a little like a media company. Grand Air Magazine, printed twice a year on FSC-certified recycled paper, and Altitude Sports Films on YouTube exist to tell human stories and show gear in the field. The store can feel like the calmer sibling of the content - which is precisely the point when the goal is to sell an identity, not just a jacket.
06How the model holds together
The business runs on retail margin from third-party brands, higher margin on Vallier, and lifetime value squeezed out of the membership and Alti Dollars. Markdowns get their own home: TheLastHunt.com, a separate site for discounted and end-of-season inventory, which keeps the core brand looking full-price and clean. With no stores to staff, logistics becomes the product - Altitude Sports offers same-day delivery in Montreal and next-day service across much of Canada, from a company with zero storefronts.
Altitude Sports Plein Air opens its first Montreal store.
The company launches altitude-sports.com.
Guimond and Dubois acquire the business.
Physical retail was down to about 2% of sales; a milkweed-insulated parka also ships that year.
The catalogue expands past 400 brands and the in-house label launches.
Environmental and community commitments get formalized.
07Where it fits, and where it is going
Altitude Sports competes with a crowded field: Canadian names like MEC, Sail and Sporting Life, US players such as Backcountry and REI, and - increasingly - the direct-to-consumer stores of the very brands it carries. Its edge is the combination that is hard to copy quickly: a curated 400-brand catalogue, a lifetime membership, an own label, a giving program with a certified badge, and a content engine, all pointed at the same customer who wants performance and style without picking one.
The next chapter is geographic. Co-CEO Guimond has said the company plans to move into the US and Europe while protecting the delivery-speed standards it built at home. For a business that has roughly doubled every two to three years by getting Canadians outside more often, the question is whether the same creed - and the same lifetime membership - travels across the border.
There is a reasonable case that it can. The pieces that made Altitude Sports work in Canada are not tied to geography: a tightly curated brand list, delivery treated as the core product, a loyalty program that rewards permanence, and a media layer that sells the lifestyle before the transaction. The harder part is scale. In the US and Europe it meets larger competitors, some of them the brands it resells, and it will have to rebuild the delivery advantage market by market. For now, the story remains one of the more instructive in Canadian retail: a 40-year-old company that grew by subtraction, closing what most retailers spend their lives protecting, and organizing everything else around a single idea about spending more time outside.