Outdoor clothes for the indoor set

Roopa Nama won't be scaling a rocky mountain any time soon, but she represents a new kind of customer for outdoors companies like The North Face.

Nama, 20, a junior at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, recently spent $80 on a fleece jacket from The North Face's boutique on Newbury Street. The money she spent, however, was for fashion, not function.

''I'm sure it keeps everyone warm, but it's really about the look," Nama said. ''Everyone at my school wears it. It has a preppy, clean-cut look."

The surging popularity of the ''outdoors look" is boosting sales at The North Face and a number of other companies, such as Timberland, the Stratham, N.H., maker of hiking boots and other outdoor gear.

The outdoors industry grew about 11 percent to $20 billion in sales in 2004 from 2002, said Michael Lee, a spokesman for the Outdoor Industry Association, a Boulder, Colo., trade organization that tracks the sector.

The majority of the industry's recent growth, Lee said, was from sales of outdoor fashion merchandise, such as clothing and shoes, not from so-called technical products like tents and camping stoves.

''There has been a shift where the outdoor look has been popular, and there are brands that represent that look," Lee said. ''The North Face has really gone hard-core with the whole fashion concept. They now have a fashion catalog and a technical catalog."

Mainstream customers who see an everyday practicality in a product will latch onto it, said Fernando Galiana, product manager for Nalge Nunc International Inc., the Rochester, N.Y. maker of the Nalgene brand of sports bottles.

The company got the idea for a line of sports bottles after some of Nalge Nunc's plastics researchers took bottles made of laboratory plastic on camping trips during the 1970s. Galiana said the researchers liked the bottles because of their virtual indestructibility. The company decided to sell them commercially and eventually created the Nalgene Outdoor division.

In recent years, the high-end water bottles have gone mainstream since college sports teams started to use Nalgene bottles and campuses started to sell them in their bookstores. Today, the bottles -- which can cost about $16 each -- are not just marketed to hikers and campers at stores such as Eastern Mountain Sports, but also to runners and bikers at sporting goods outlets.

Galiana wouldn't disclose sales figures for the Nalgene bottles but said the product makes up ''a significant portion of our sales."

Test tubes and other scientific equipment sold to research laboratories still account for most of the revenue that comes into Nalge Nunc.

''If it wasn't for the consumer bottles, most people wouldn't know us," he said.

Madison Riley, a principal at Kurt Salmon Associates, a retail consulting firm, said another reason for the recent boom in the outdoor industry is that people like buying ''authentic" products, even if they don't plan to climb a mountain.

''Think about New Balance or Nike and brands like that," he said. ''Most people aren't buying their shoes to run a marathon; they just want the aura, the brand presence. People aspire to have that authenticity."

North Face and Timberland aren't the first outdoors companies to develop a mainstream following. Abercrombie & Fitch, now known as one of the country's top purveyors of clothing for high school and college-aged students, started out as an outfitter to adventurers in 1892.

While outdoors companies are enjoying a newly expanded consumer base, executives are quick to defend their commitment to their core customer: the outdoorsman.

''What we are doing, which has always been a philosophy of The North Face, is billing us as having the best products for athletes and outdoors enthusiasts," said Joe Flannery, vice president of marketing at the San Leandro, Calif., company.

Flannery said that although his company recognizes its new audience, there are no plans to begin catering to trend makers, even though the company offers a fashion catalog in addition to its traditional technical catalog.

''We advertise in the most core outdoor magazines. We don't advertise in a lifestyle sort of way," he said. ''We're not going to try and chase that market."

Timberland spokeswoman Robin Giampa said the company ''has always been committed to our outdoors customers," but wouldn't elaborate on any push to broaden its appeal. Already, the company offers a wide variety of colors of shoes and an expanded line of casual clothing. It also sells its products at popular stores like Macy's, Lord & Taylor, and Foot Locker.

What's also boosting sales of outdoor products is that companies are building stand-alone stores in upscale shopping districts frequented by the young and fashionable.

Besides its year-old Newbury Street store, The North Face also has a shop in Beverly Hills, Calif., that opened in 2002.

''It's literally one of the richest blocks of shopping districts in the world," said North Face's Flannery. ''You're not going to find our performance from Prada. We're putting first-class outdoors gear right in the middle of first-class shopping."

And for consumers like Nama, the strategy makes it easier to shop, even if she isn't the outdoors type.

''If I ever did go camping, I wouldn't take it," she said of her new North Face jacket. ''I wouldn't want to ruin it."