Matthew Pantoja

Consider the humble bomber jacket. It was built for pilots who needed to survive a cold cockpit, not for anyone who wanted to look good buying coffee. That the MA-1 now does both jobs with equal ease is, in part, the work of a man whose title sounds abstract and whose results are anything but. Matthew Pantoja is the Chief Brand Officer of Alpha Industries, which is a formal way of saying he is responsible for whether a 60-year-old supplier of military outerwear feels like a relic or feels like right now.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Heritage is a lovely thing to have and a dangerous thing to lean on. Rest your whole weight on it and you become a museum: admired, visited occasionally, purchased almost never. Ignore it entirely and you throw away the one asset money cannot buy, which is time. The trick, and it is genuinely a trick, is to keep both plates spinning. Alpha Industries has the history. Pantoja's job is to make sure it also has a pulse.

He arrived at this problem the long way around. Before Alpha, Pantoja spent two decades learning that culture and commerce are not opposites but collaborators who happen to argue a lot. He began in streetwear at Triple 5 Soul, a New York label that understood cool before cool had a marketing budget. Then came New Era, the cap company, where he ran the urban business unit and did the sort of thing that gets you remembered: he grew sales from 90 million dollars to 165 million. He also built a 15 million dollar collaboration program, working with partners such as Supreme back when a hat drop could still stop traffic.

That is the recurring theme of his resume, if you read it closely. Pantoja is a collaboration man. He seems to understand, at a level most marketers only claim to, that a brand is not a logo you protect but a conversation you keep having with the people who wear it. Get the conversation right and the logo takes care of itself.

The New Era years gave way to a stretch at Subculture Conglomerate, where he served as senior account director and, in his first year, generated more than 10 million dollars in revenue while shepherding youth-focused work for Mountain Dew. It is a strange but instructive pairing: soda and streetwear, both of them selling less a product than a feeling of belonging to something faster and younger than you actually are. Pantoja has spent his whole career in that business, the business of belonging.

Then Reebok came calling, and the assignment got harder. From 2011 to 2013 he was Head of Entertainment and Influencer Marketing, which is a very long title for a very simple mandate: make Reebok feel alive again. He directed global entertainment strategy, activated around CrossFit before CrossFit was everywhere, and worked with Creative Director Swizz Beatz to give Reebok Classics a second youth. The scoreboard cooperated. The brand posted 17.5 percent sales growth, its first double-digit jump since 2005. You do not get numbers like that from a spreadsheet. You get them from persuading people that a sneaker they had stopped noticing was worth noticing again.

A detour through Palladium Boots followed, where he was Senior Director of Marketing and E-Commerce from 2013 to 2016, repositioning the brand across every channel and running a 15-store retail footprint. By now the pattern was unmistakable. Caps. Soda. Sneakers. Boots. Pantoja had become a kind of one-man tour of American cool, and each stop taught the same lesson from a different angle: the product is the easy part; the meaning is the hard part.

He joined Alpha Industries in 2016 as Vice President of Marketing and E-Commerce and set about the meaning problem in earnest. Alpha had spent decades as a serious supplier of serious jackets built to genuine military specification. The MA-1 bomber and the M-65 field jacket were not fashion statements; they were equipment. But equipment, it turns out, ages beautifully when it is honest, and honest is exactly what those jackets are. Pantoja's insight was to stop apologizing for the surplus-store past and start treating it as the whole point. The military heritage was not baggage. It was the brand.

The market agreed. Over the following years Alpha completed the migration from army-navy staple to global lifestyle label, the field jacket quietly changing from a thing your uncle wore to a thing on a runway, then a sidewalk, then everyone. In January 2022 the company made its recognition official and created a role that had not existed before: Chief Brand Officer, reporting directly to CEO Michael Cirker, with oversight of product, marketing and brand experience across every category, region and channel. It was a promotion that read less like a reward and more like an admission that one person had been doing all of that anyway.

Pantoja, for his part, sounded like exactly what a brand wants its brand chief to be: a fan who never stopped being a fan. "The Alpha Industries brand and the people here are really special and passionate about the brand and its heritage," he said on his appointment. "They continue to accept the challenges we face and are constantly pushing the brand to evolve. I am grateful for the opportunity they've given me and excited to continue to help shape Alpha's future." Notice what is missing from that quote: any mention of himself, really. It is all brand, people, heritage, future. Twenty years in, and the enthusiasm still reads as sincere. That, more than any campaign, may be the whole trick.

What comes next is the same challenge dressed in new weather. Fashion is a fickle industry that treats last season the way the tide treats a sandcastle. A heritage brand's advantage is that it has survived many tides already; its risk is believing that survival is automatic. Pantoja's task, as it has always been, is to keep Alpha Industries evolving without letting it forget the jacket in the middle of the story. So far the jackets keep selling and the brand keeps feeling current, which in an industry this unforgiving counts as something close to a magic act. There is nothing mystical about it, of course. It is just a marketer who understood, earlier than most, that people do not buy outerwear. They buy the version of themselves the outerwear lets them imagine.