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Here’s how the company fought to get its identity back from extremists.
On the evening of July 10, 2021, Spencer Harkins lay in the bed of his Chevrolet Silverado in the parking lot of Mt. Shasta Ski Park, in McCloud, California. Harkins had competed in a mountain bike race at the resort earlier that day, and he was relaxing and thumbing through his iPhone.
The moment of solitude was broken when a friend called to alert him to a video being shared on Twitter. Shot just outside the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, an annual Republican gathering that was being held that day in Dallas, it featured an alt-right extremist named Nick Fuentes standing in front of a small crowd of supporters.
“I’m off Twitter. I have nothing to lose,” Fuentes said, referencing his recent ban for repeated violations on the social media platform after using it to spread white-nationalist propaganda and hate speech. “This is going to be the most racist, most sexist, the most anti-Semitic, the most Holocaust-denying speech in all of Dallas this weekend.”
Harkins didn’t want to hear any more, but he also couldn’t take his eyes off what Fuentes was wearing. The 22-year-old leader of the Groyper Army, which has been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a white supremacist group, sported a navy-blue suit while hiding behind all-too-familiar eyewear: a pair of extra-large yellow wraparound Pit Viper Original sunglasses. And it wasn’t just Fuentes wearing those shades: Several men in the crowd could be seen in similar apparel as everyone chanted, “Groyper! Groyper! Groyper!”
Harkins knew that look because he was in charge of popularizing it. He was Pit Viper’s head of marketing and had worked hard to position the pricey upstart brand’s sunglasses (a pair of Originals goes for $99) as the must-have accessory for anyone seeking a fun-loving and irreverent vibe. That included star athletes, fraternity members, punks—but they never expected to be adopted by white nationalists.
Founded in 2012 by Chuck Mumford and Chris Garcin, a pair of University of Colorado graduates turned itinerant ski bums, Pit Viper presents itself as the jock-jester within the world of sports fashion. The sunglasses look like relics from an ’80s movie, with Jackson Pollock-like paint splatters and enormous lenses, and are sold with taglines such as “Voted #69th best sunglass brand page, by your mom.”
In less than a decade, Pit Viper has grown from a company of two guys with sales of around $10,000 to one with 70 employees and a 30,000-square-foot office (plus a 20,000-square-foot warehouse) in Salt Lake City. It’s also picked up some major athlete endorsements along the way: freestyle-skiing legend Tanner Hall in 2019, NASCAR phenom Brehanna Daniels in 2020, and, in April of this year—just three months before the Fuentes video—NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski.
In fact, sports stars seem drawn to the mega-brand because it has somehow kept its street cred. “When I wear them, people notice. Like, I’ll be at the grocery store and young kids are like, ‘Sick Pit Vipers,’” says Oregon-based pro mountain biker Kirt Voreis, who signed with the company in May 2021 and was regularly promoting the sunglasses to his 69,000 Instagram followers ahead of the Fuentes broadcast.
Over the past year, however, the folks at Pit Viper have found themselves in something of a branding nightmare as their gear has been co-opted by an alt-right crowd that also seems drawn to the company’s uniquely cheeky style. Undeniable evidence of the growing problem first surfaced in video footage of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, when alt-right personality Anthime Gionet—better known by the online sobriquet “Baked Alaska”—was spotted protesting in a pair of red Pit Vipers. (He was later arrested and is still awaiting trial for violent and disorderly conduct and knowingly entering a restricted building.)
Two days after the event, Pit Viper responded to that association with a Facebook post to the brand’s 241,000 followers that simply read, “Fuck terrorists. Fuck fascists. Fuck racists. If you’re not down with that, fuck off.”
That same day, the company shared a retro collage of a skier, skateboarder, and mountain biker with its 800,000 Instagram followers alongside the message “EXTREME SPORTS NOT EXTREMIST LOSERS.” On Twitter, the company tweeted “we didn’t make these for your bullshit.”
The social media blitz prompted plenty of backlash. Some people called them snowflakes or sellouts, and at least one guy livestreamed himself smashing his sunglasses. But Fuentes took a different tack: He just kept wearing Pit Vipers. After all, the flame war was only giving his message more exposure. “Almost any white-supremacist group would love to get in a feud with a company,” says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “It’s all about gaining attention.”
Nevertheless, Harkins refused to disengage—not after the Capitol riots and not after the more recent Fuentes stunt at CPAC. Lying in his truck bed on that July evening, Harkins knew “a swelling of people were going to see this [video],” he says. Shortly after midnight, he took control of the Pit Viper Twitter to offer his response: “any website wiz-types out there who know how to prevent racist losers from buying your product? asking for Nick Fuentes who needs to stop wearing Pit Vipers. Thanks.”
It was the latest salvo in a pitched battle for the identity of the beloved action-sports brand.
Pit Viper’s origin story is as scrappy as its social media presence would suggest. Mumford and Garcin met at the University of Colorado. After graduating in 2007, both jumped right into the ski industry. Garcin worked as a park and pipe coach; Mumford tried his hand at the pro circuit, appearing on the international freeride tour and in the 2011 ski flick G.N.A.R. (He also had a job at a ski shop to pay the bills.) “I was just kind of waiting for my next move in life,” Mumford tells me on a joint Zoom call with Garcin in late August.
Around the time G.N.A.R. dropped, Mumford broke his sunglasses during a ski trip in Idaho, so he strolled into a nearby Army surplus store to find a cheap replacement. He spotted a pair of military-style shades that were designed to offer maximum protection from the elements and that seemed to him like something out of a ski movie that once inspired him, the 1988 classic Blizzard of AAHHH’s. In an era of sleek and minimalist design, they looked somehow practical and rebellious. Over the next few months, Mumford bought as many pairs as he could find, hand-painting them in the devil-may-care style of decades past and selling them to friends, and then friends’ friends, and so on. He called them Pit Vipers, a phrase his buddies had used to describe his style of skiing.
By 2014, Mumford had found a manufacturer to make his own eyewear but realized he needed some help keeping up with demand, so he called Garcin, who was operating a small sticker company as a side hustle. Garcin suggested they also add stickers to the lenses, and soon they began “painstakingly putting stickers on every single fucking pair of sunglasses,” he says.
Everything changed that same year after a Kickstarter campaign netted Garcin and Mumford nearly $40,000 to help them manufacture their own frames and build a website. These days, Pit Viper offers six models of sunglasses (plus one pair of goggles) and is raking in tens of millions in sales per year. While early news coverage portrayed the cofounders as Jeff Spicoli types who loved to talk about beer pong and powder turns, the guys staring back at me on my computer screen are now in their mid-30s and decked in simple gray T-shirts. They also seem to take their business quite seriously, even if they’re still making YouTube videos with titles like “PIT VIPER EMPLOYEE BATHES IN RANCH” and “WE JUMPED A F*CKING HOT TUB LIMO!”
Maybe they are too tired for the party-boy shtick—Mumford and his wife recently had two kids; Garcin and his wife just welcomed their first—or maybe the shtick itself gets harder to feign as the company scales. “A lot of my job has turned into talking to attorneys and accountants,” Garcin says. “It isn’t just like dicking around and planning out ridiculous PR stunts.”
There’s no easy explanation as to why a particular brand catches on with the extremist groups or movements. Sometimes it’s because the product relates to a niche joke (for example, the anti-government Boogaloo Bois seem to have adopted Hawaiian shirts as a symbol of revolution, in part to reference the obscure 1984 film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, in which breakdancing teenagers fight to save their community center from crooked politicians); often it’s simply a matter of some sartorial bellwether drawing attention to the item. “It’s like anything else: One or two sort of influencers in the scene are spotted wearing it and it catches on,” says Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociologist at American University, labeling this latter adoption pattern a form of co-opting.
Garcin speculates to me that the Groypers were trying to “co-opt fun.” (Fuentes did not reply to Men’s Health’s request for comment.) The problem, of course, is that as brand adoption spreads, so does the likelihood of another person committing a violent act in signature action-sports gear—just like during the Capitol riots. Through social media or online videos, Fuentes has stated that white males are in danger of genocide and shared anti-Semitic comments and homophobic slurs. He once asked, perhaps facetiously, “What can you or I do to oppose state legislators besides kill them?" In fact, in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riots, Fuentes advocated for an uprising. As The New Yorker reported, he told the crowd at a pro-Trump rally, "Our Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do."
Chanting before they leave: pic.twitter.com/vAoM864lcs
“He’s not dangerous in the sense that he’s going to commit some sort of violent act,” the ADL’s Pitcavage says about Fuentes. “He’s dangerous in the sense that he recruits people to the white-supremacist movement, particularly younger people. He’s got a group of very devoted followers.”
Miller-Idriss says there are also “examples of other brands pushing back” against extremist adopters, citing outfitter Fred Perry’s decision in 2020 to pull one of its shirts from store shelves after it had become part of the Proud Boys’ ensemble. Pit Viper is just pushing back “in a harder way,” she says.
To that end, five days after the brand called out Fuentes on Twitter, it doubled down with another tweet, declaring that it would give $600—the amount Fuentes claimed to have spent on Pit Viper sunglasses that he handed out to a few of his followers at CPAC—to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit. The tweet announcing the donation was characteristically sardonic: “Money received from confirmed racists will be donated in their name. Thanks for working against your cause Nick Fuentes!”
New Policy: Money received from confirmed racists will be donated in their name. Thanks for working against your cause Nick Fuentes! pic.twitter.com/i8RpWVJLvD
Hours later, Fuentes fired back. “Pit Vipers are a symbol of Right Wing Extremism pass it on,” he wrote on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, one of the few social media services that hasn’t banned him. But in a follow-up post, he seemed to waver. Fuentes told his followers to “stop buying Pit Vipers,” even though he was going to continue wearing his “because Baked Alaska wore them in the Capitol, a truly world-historical moment.” The question of just how far alt-righters may go to retaliate against the company is a scary one. Early last summer, a far-right YouTube commentator published photos from Garcin’s wife’s baby shower online. Such invasions of privacy are often considered a form of intimidation, although Garcin wasn’t aware of the incident until I mention it during our phone call. “Great, really love this stuff,” he says in frustration.
In late October, another alt-right attack over social media forced the company to shut down a livestreamed stunt from its warehouse. Employees were supposed to be pretending to frantically process new product orders—a joke about the potential power of a web sale the brand was holding at the time—but the moment was ruined by people posting racist and other inappropriate remarks about those staffers in comment threads.
Just before they cut the feed, one of the warehouse workers, exasperated by the YouTube comments, threatened to dox anyone displaying bigoted behavior. “Those at [Pit Viper] who noticed these comments got upset, and made the ‘threats’ jokingly,” a company spokesperson told Men’s Health in an emailed statement. “Obviously [they were] never acted upon.” But that moment of frustration appears to have given trolls another tactic: Within days the Better Business Bureau had received 11 anonymous complaints, including one that says Pit Viper “is giving out customer information for political reasons.” Another says, “This company is shit.” Gionet originally shared the idea of notifying the BBB on Telegram, with Fuentes offering a signal boost.
When asked about the BBB complaints, Pit Viper’s president, Dave Bottomley, who joined the company in 2020, says, “Anyone who follows us knows we say outrageous things, meant to be funny. This of course was not acted upon, but meant to deter those who spread hate. We uphold all business and privacy policies.”
Pit Viper’s social media vigilantism might have caused the company some internal headaches, but it hasn’t put a dent in business. Though Pit Viper declined to share specific figures, it did confirm that sales have continued to trend upward. Since the CPAC spat, the brand has inked a sponsorship deal with the New England Patriots, released a limited-edition pair of sunglasses in collaboration with the motorsports-focused apparel company Hoonigan, and signed extreme-skiing pioneer Glen Plake to its roster of athletes.
Voreis, the pro mountain biker who joined Pit Viper just before the Fuentes flap, says the saga only made him appreciate Pit Viper more. “I like companies that are kind of like ‘Don’t take yourself too seriously, but let’s be serious about how we feel about each other,’” he says.
When Plake announced the sponsorship news in September to his 44,000 Instagram followers, he was only vaguely aware of the drama with Fuentes. “It was not [part of] my decision-making to join Pit Viper,” he says. Still, the little Plake has heard has only further cemented his enthusiasm for the brand. “It aligns us with a group of people who actually don’t have opinions like [the far right] and care more about individuals themselves as opposed to groups that stand for one thing or another,” he says. “I don’t want to say we don’t stand for anything. We really respect individuals for who they are.”
Since the flame war started, Pit Viper has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the SPLC plus organizations like the Trevor Project, which provides LGBTQ+ youth with suicide-prevention services. But, in general, Mumford and Garcin insist their brand remains apolitical. “That’s not a political thing; that’s just [supporting] humanity,” Mumford says during our call.
Garcin nods and feels compelled to clarify the brand’s loyalties one more time. “We always talk about Party Mountain, right?” he says, referencing a fictitious capital of hedonism that appears in promotional materials for Pit Viper. “On Party Mountain, everybody’s invited. You just have to accept everybody else as they are and have a good time. If you’re not able to do that, then you’re not invited.”