Thursday, October 15, 2015

What Happened To Urban Outfitters' Splashy New Fitness Brand Without Walls?

The Instagram account for Urban Outfitters’ new Without Walls brand is gone, along with its blog and dedicated website.

An archived snap of Without Walls' site from Sept. 8.

Urban Outfitters / Via web.archive.org

Last year, Urban Outfitters splashily launched a new fitness and outdoors brand called Without Walls, selling items like $88 performance onesies, $68 jogger pants and $699 tents under its own label and from brands like Patagonia and The North Face.

Today, barely a trace of Without Walls can be found.

Its dedicated website and blog are gone, and its Instagram account is no longer available, BuzzFeed News noticed. Its Twitter account has been inactive since March, and URLs for Without Walls' blog posts and website reroute to the Urban homepage.

The nascent brand appears to have been folded into Urban Outfitters' own website, and is presently down to a single page of mostly discounted products.

The retailer has added a dedicated Without Walls FAQ to its site that says Without Walls credit and merchandise can be used at UrbanOutfitters.com and that the label will still be sold online and in stores, suggesting it will continue in a watered down form. Urban Outfitters, which also owns Free People and Anthropologie, declined to comment on the deletions.

Without Walls garnered plenty of attention after launching in March 2014. A snapshot of its Instagram page from April through Wayback Machine shows it had more than 70,000 followers.

"Without Walls was launched with significant hype and there was talk at the time of this potentially becoming a stand alone concept," said Liz Dunn, CEO of retail consulting firm Talmage Advisors. "I thought the assortment was solid but it doesn't surprise me that their customer might not have been looking for that product from them."