A customer who has not bought anything for four months is an awkward person to impress. They know the shop. They have already spent money there. Another advertisement may pass them by. In the run-up to Black Friday in 2018, Altitude Sports tried something tangible: it mailed mini-catalogues to 160,000 selected customers. Within 30 days, 4.2 per cent had placed an order. An online retailer had found a useful reason to buy postage.
Maxime Dubois, its co-owner and co-CEO, had spent years helping move the business towards the web. He was still willing to let paper do some of the selling. There is a pleasing lack of vanity in that decision. A catalogue does not care how modern the person holding it feels. It just has to survive the journey from letterbox to recycling bin long enough to be opened.
That willingness to follow a practical result runs through Dubois’s working life. With Alexandre Guimond, his longtime friend and former roommate, he bought Altitude Sports in 2011. The partnership has since involved inventory systems, financing, wages and environmental commitments. The outdoor clothing provides the colour. The decisions behind it make the story.
The business before the keys
Altitude Sports was already an established Montreal retailer when Dubois arrived as marketing director in 2008. Its origins went back to 1984. Guimond had worked there for years and had begun developing its online strategy. Dubois joined him in pushing that work further: a renewed e-commerce website followed in 2009, then The Last Hunt, a destination for past-season merchandise, in 2010.
The two had known each other since high school. By the time they became owners, they had both a friendship and a record of working together. The buyout grew out of a business they could observe from inside. They were close enough to see what customers wanted, and close enough to recognise the limits of the existing operation.
When they acquired the company, online sales were already ahead of the stores. That made the purchase a particularly interesting kind of bet. They were committing money and years of work to an opportunity whose early evidence they had helped produce. Owning it would bring the chance to move faster, along with responsibility for everything that failed to keep up.
The glamour of knowing where the stock is
Dubois has been unusually plain about the work behind an online business. He treats e-commerce as subject to the familiar rules of running a shop. That is a refreshing sentence in a field where even buying socks can acquire the vocabulary of a scientific breakthrough.
The partners introduced inventory software, cash-flow projections and dashboards, brought web development and marketing inside the company, and sought advice from experienced businesspeople. Each intervention addressed an ordinary commercial problem. Stock had to be located. Bills had to be paid through seasonal changes. Decisions needed numbers behind them. The increasingly visible website depended on a great deal of largely invisible organisation.
For Dubois, this work also sat behind the customer experience. A shopper sees a delivery promise, a product description, a returns process. The owner has to arrange the people and systems that make those things credible. Technical clothing can be complicated enough before the retailer adds an unexplained delay.
“Just because you’re in e-commerce doesn’t mean you’re going to reinvent the wheel.”Maxime Dubois
The physical stores eventually disappeared from the model, with the last closing in 2016. For a business born on a Montreal shopping street, that was a substantial change in how it met its customers. The shop’s knowledge had to travel through descriptions, advice and the service surrounding an order. The owners were asking customers to trust them from a distance, including people who had never walked through the original door. A familiar local business was learning to introduce itself across a country.
A banker stays for the next chapter
The acquisition began a financial relationship that continued through several stages of growth. BDC supported the owners in 2011. In January 2018, BDC Capital announced a minority equity investment. The business had grown from 15 employees at the purchase to more than 130; almost 300,000 parcels had gone out in 2017.
Those numbers belong to that period, but they show how quickly the owners’ job had changed. A team once counted in the teens had become an organisation requiring layers of expertise. The pair were still running the business, with an institutional investor now holding a stake in its future.
Further financial assistance arrived in November 2019. Dubois identified two projects it would help support: the marketplace and Vallier, the company’s clothing brand. The marketplace let partner brands offer products through the Altitude Sports platform. Vallier extended the business into its own approach to urban technical clothing. He also spoke then about international expansion as a medium-term ambition.
Each project asked a different question of the same customer relationship. Could the shop offer a wider selection? Could it design something of its own? Could the model travel? An acquisition had become a platform for further experiments.
A detour through the letterbox
By then, the company had also learned that the internet need not supply every part of an online sale. Its catalogue campaign targeted people who had not purchased for at least 120 days. The return visit happened on a screen, but the invitation arrived on paper.
“If you’re putting your money into one channel, you’re missing an opportunity,” Dubois said. The observation leaves room for a customer to behave like an actual person: distracted, interested, busy, occasionally reminded of a good shop by something sitting on a table.
The printed work extended beyond mini-catalogues into a twice-yearly magazine. That gave the retailer room for travel, products and the stories of the brands it carried. A screen is excellent at helping someone find the thing they already want. An editorial page can let them linger over something they had never thought to search for.
The holiday rush meets the hourly rate
In 2021, a different bottleneck appeared. The company needed staff for the holiday season and was struggling to recruit. Dubois said it studied the labour market and found its pay was insufficiently competitive. Altitude Sports raised hourly wages by $2 for customer service and distribution centre workers.
Recruitment improved. The workforce grew from 220 to 520 as the retailer prepared for the busy period. These were seasonal staffing figures, rather than a permanent headcount to carry forward indefinitely. They nevertheless made the consequences of the decision visible.
There is a direct connection between that hourly rate and the promise on a checkout page. Someone has to answer the question about a size. Someone has to retrieve the parcel. A business can announce all the delivery ambitions it likes; the work still needs people willing to turn up and do it.
Dubois also spoke candidly that year about stock shortages and told customers to consider shopping early. Keeping a customer informed can be less comfortable than presenting an immaculate offer. It gives them something more useful to plan around.
A coat with two addresses
The products themselves bridge two settings. Dubois has described Montreal as an influence on the company’s interest in clothing that works outdoors and looks at home in a city. A technical jacket can make the trip from a trail to an ordinary weekday without requiring its wearer to change allegiances.
He likes skiing and cycling, but has said he is no elite athlete. That makes an appealing fit with a shop serving people whose outdoor ambitions vary considerably. Equipment needs explaining. Customers need a size that works. Expertise becomes useful when it helps somebody choose, rather than leaving them embarrassed to ask.
There are quieter ways to step away from the working day, too. Asked about a favourite app in 2022, Dubois chose Radio-Canada’s OHdio. He described it as a way to think about something other than work. For someone whose business lives online, an audio app offers a nicely modest change of scene: other people get to do the talking.
At the same time, a retailer selling the outdoors has a material interest in preserving it. Altitude Sports’ Alti Action programme connected customer donations with community organisations. In its 2017-2018 reporting, the Old Brewery Mission recorded $17,910 in support from the retailer. It is one concrete example of where the relationship extended beyond a purchase.
Another set of things to measure
In the owners’ introduction to their inaugural impact report, Dubois and Guimond described an intention to formalise commitments, reduce the business’s environmental footprint and work with suppliers. That adds demanding questions to a retailer’s agenda. Selling durable equipment is one part; examining how the operation itself behaves is another continuing responsibility.
Altitude Sports attained B Corp certification in July 2024. Its fiscal 2025 impact report also records a revised bonus structure, introduced in 2024, tying part of annual bonuses to sustainability targets. An ambition had acquired a place in compensation. The report identifies Dubois as both co-CEO and a member of the board.
His career has accumulated these obligations one decision at a time. The friend became a colleague, then a co-owner. The online shop needed a warehouse operation, financial partners and people who could carry it through December. Paper returned through the letterbox. Environmental aims entered the bonus calculation.
The shop has changed considerably since Dubois arrived. Its owners still have the recurring task of making the next promise work in practice. Somewhere between a jacket, a parcel and a person waiting for it, there is always another detail to get right.