The North Face Climb Festival
We brought The North Face’s urban climbing festival back to London, combining experiential, communications and partnerships expertise to make climbing the talk of the town.
Above deep water, on the banks of the River Thames, the world's best urban climbers went head-to-head for two days, watched by 16,000 people. This is how we turned Climb Festival into one of London's biggest urban sports moments of 2026.
Our relationship with The North Face goes back over a decade. They've known us as their go-to sport & lifestyle PR agency. In 2026, they asked us for something different: not a campaign, but a festival, built from the ground up, at four times the scale, in the heart of London.
We combined experiential, communications and partnerships expertise to deliver it.
The result: climbing became the talk of the town.
The Brief
London’s Climb Festival's 2024 proved the concept. For 2026, The North Face wanted to go bigger without losing the authenticity that made climbers trust it in the first place.
Our pitch: move the festival to a bigger, more accessible venue and open it up to audiences at every level, from elite athletes to first-time climbers. That vision won us the brief to lead development, production and delivery of Climb Festival 2026 - a two-day solo climbing competition staged above deep water.
Planning
We chose Royal Victoria Docks, on the river, in front of City Hall. It was the venue that matched our ambition: four times the footprint of 2024. It also meant delivering a major public event in one of the most tightly regulated stretches of the capital.
Over 16,000 visitors. 131 registered athletes. Hundreds of production and delivery staff. All safely and securely managed in a live, working part of London. This meant coordinating permits and approvals, crowd management, security, and relationships with local authorities, residents and business stakeholders, all at once.
Experience
Over eight months, our teams designed and delivered a true urban festival around the competition. Not just a sporting event, but a weekend worth showing up for. Live music and film, workshops, and hands-on climbing experiences for all ages with special guests Conrad Anker and Alex Honnald.
The North Face was woven through the experience rather than stamped on it: an integrated retail pop-up, live product repair and personalisation, and playful challenges that got visitors climbing themselves. Food trucks, bars and partner activations gave the festival its pulse - the sound and energy of a genuine cultural event, not a brand activation with a climbing wall attached.
Partnerships
Our partnerships expertise added a layer no one else could bring, each collaborator making the festival feel bigger than the sum of its parts. JUBEL brought a social drinks offer to the crowd. Yeti produced branded Climb Festival bottles.
Tenzing kept athletes and visitors fuelled. Official radio partner RINSE FM broadcast live from the site, pulling in an audience far beyond the docks. And for climbers who couldn't make it to London, partnerships with regional climbing gyms turned Climb Festival into the anchor event of the brand's first 'Global Climbing Day' — extending the moment far past the Thames.
Our four-person content team captured the action in real time — broadcast edits, photography, motion graphics and a wrap film, with hundreds of assets turned around the same day.
After more than a decade as The North Face's PR partner, Climb Festival 2026 showed what's possible when the full Mongoose offer comes together: Partnerships, communications and experience, working as one.
16,000
people experienced Climb Festival in person over two days+131%
on-site retail sales beat the 2024 benchmark2,000+
people signed up to The North Face’s XPLR community membership programme