HILL CITY TAKES ON MEN’S ACTIVEWEAR

Cocooned in near-secrecy within the San Francisco offices of Gap Inc. brand Athleta, Noah Palmer has spent the last 18 months quietly building Hill City, a highperformance men’s clothing brand with the ethos of a startup and the mission of reinventing stylish men’s basics for today’s active lifestyle.

On the surface it’s the longawaited male counterpart to Athleta, but when you rip open up the seams, it’s something much fresher. Palmer, a strapping former professional

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soccer player, is the archetype of the Hill City customer: He’s a San Francisco husband, father, athlete and professional. Prior to founding Hill City, he was a merchandiser at Old Navy, another Gap Inc. brand.

When he looked at the marketplace, he didn’t find clothing that could keep up with his multifaceted life. Brands were strictly fragmented into categories, such as outdoors, active, lifestyle and work.

“You’re not just an outdoorsman or just an athlete or just a guy with the job. You’re all those things, and maybe all of them at once,” he said. Hill City was his savvy sartorial solution. “We felt like it was our job to thread those segments of the market together under one brand roof.”

With a personal mission and the city of San Francisco a ready muse — its mercurial weather and invigorating topography set the brand’s performance standards — Hill City’s cozy Bay Area team set out finding innovative ways to imbue fashionable essentials with the technical components of performance clothing. Noah Palmer, with an assist from Gap Inc., aims to redefine men’s high-performance wear.

Before long, they had developed prototypes, like tailored chinos made from deceptively lightweight, moisture-wicking material and natty thermos-regulating jackets with surprising stretch. Working under the auspices of Gap Inc. gave Hill City a wealth of fit and sizing data to draw on, but the team was in uncharted territory when it came to satisfying customers’ practical needs with these hybrid garments.

After testing prototypes themselves, they began passing out early iterations of clothing to friends and family. This proved so helpful that they decided to scale it further. Hill City gave clothing to 100 men in return for their feedback. They discovered everything from a desire for more customizable features like color, length and weight to a universal need for more zip pockets.

“We realized we could basically pull that experience further upstream so that it gets baked into our product design process,” Palmer says. In this way, he adds, “we’re building this Hill City brand not as a group of 18 to 20 (team members), but as a community. That’s cool.”

By the time Hill City launched online to the public in mid-October, there was a wait list for future wear-testers 30,000 long and a warehouse chock full of handsome workhorse pieces that perform with as much sophistication as they’re styled.

Each piece has been honed for the wearer’s most pressing needs; for example, the lightweight tailored chino prototype evolved into the Everyday Tech Pant, complete with zip pockets stealthily built into the seam of the hand pockets and a patent-pending “adaptive waistband” that allows for movement. The look is streamlined, debonair, boardroom-appropriate — and yet the pants are highperformance enough that they can be worn biking over the Golden Gate, up Nob Hill and into the office.

Unlike conventional brands, Hill City doesn’t plan on releasing a new collection each season, but rather will continue to improve, adapt and expand existing designs, adding new styles as they’re ready. The startup’s commerce model (the collection must be purchased online but it can be viewed for a limited time at select Athleta stores) allows the brand to eschew traditional timelines and operate more iteratively.

At the end of the day, however, Hill City is still part of international retail giant Gap Inc., and good old-fashioned sales will be king. “Active (wear) is a key growth area for Gap Inc. and Hill City is our response to consistent feedback from customers looking for a premium men’s product,” Art Peck, president and CEO, Gap Inc., said in a statement.

Whether Hill City’s brand of San Francisco activewear resonates with men outside of the Bay Area is the brand’s biggest peak yet to be summited.

Maggie Winterfeldt Clark is a San Francisco freelance writer. Email: style@sfchronicle.com.

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