New norm for uniforms: Vail Resorts rolls out employee-designed kits with an eye toward the future

By now you may have noticed a new look among staffers at Vail Mountain and Beaver Creek resorts.

Gone are the days of the spectrum of colors guests once saw on the mountain. Vail Resorts has rolled out a new line of Helly Hansen jackets and pants for employees that are, for lack of a better term, more uniform across the company.

Mountain safety is still in yellow, maintenance workers are still in black, but managers and ski patrollers will now be in crimson-over-black jackets with black pants, while all other operations workers will be in a simple blue-over-black uniform. The old gray jackets, affectionately known as “Siberian special forces,” are now a thing of the past along with the green “EPICkles” and all other same-color pant-and-jacket kits.

Jeff Babb, senior director of Resort Operations for Vail Mountain, has been working on Vail Resorts’ uniforms since 2010, when a request for proposal was first put out for outerwear brands to design uniforms for the company’s thousands of on-mountain employees.

Making it simple

One of the main motivators for the effort was, simply, finding a pair of pants that workers wouldn’t complain about.

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“Pants are the biggest pain point,” Babb said.

But there’s a lot more to it, including that full spectrum of colors you once saw among employees.

“One of the reasons we did this was to get rid of all of these different colors,” Babb said. “That was part of our conversation with Helly as we looked at this new program — we really thought that the guest doesn’t particularly care what color things are, they just want to find an employee, so we’ve made the garments where they are easily recognizable with the big logos so that a guest can find an employee and get their issue resolved.”

Reducing the carbon footprint of the process also played a major role in the uniform overhaul. Babb says if you really want to be sustainable, then you need to take care of your gear and use it for a long time. So he got to work on a program that will include regular tune-ups to keep gear lasting long and an end-of-life process that ensures that the gear will be reused in other products once it has outlived its useful life as an all-weather garment.

Helly Hansen presented itself as an attractive option for Vail Resorts through its partnership with Recircled, a Denver-based company with a plant in Sidney, Nebraska, that deconstructs old uniforms and turns them into countertops and construction insulation.

Helly Hansen’s European roots made the company appealing when it came to the carbon footprint, Babb said.

“Being a European-based company, the European standards are a little ahead of our standards in the United States, so Helly Hansen had already been working diligently to meet the European standards — the Bluesign standards, etcetera — that existed in Europe,” Babb said. “So they were a little ahead of the game already.”

Babb said the new uniforms — which consist of a jacket, pants, a mid layer, and in some cases, a utility vest — are made with some recycled materials and will be 100 percent recyclable at the end of their useful life through the Recircled facility in Nebraska.

Putting the kits to the test

Helly Hansen was also responsive to feedback, Babb said, meeting with him on a monthly basis to incorporate Vail Resorts’ suggestions into the new designs. Feedback came from Vail Resorts workers who put the uniforms to the test and reported back to Babb, he said.

During the winter of 2022-23, Vail Resorts maintenance workers and ski patrollers tried out the garments at 17 different resorts.

“We had the manufacturer send us about 150 kits worth of test garments, and we put those on employees across our enterprise,” Babb said. “We wanted to make sure we covered all of our geographic regions as they’re obviously different, to hopefully garner as much feedback as we can for different resorts, for different regions and different climates. We asked those employees to fill out a report for us on a weekly basis.”

When the ski season ended in North America, the testing continued in Australia, Babb said. And at the end of it, they were able to work together to engineer pants that fit everyone.

“The fit was our biggest hurdle, because garments are very personal, how they fit and how they work, so a uniform program has to be kind of dynamic,” Babb said. “We incorporated a great amount of adjustability into our pants for our uniforms; the pants can be very easily lengthened, the pants can be very easily shortened, they have quite a bit of adjustment in the waist, plus with a new fabric that is more payable, more conforming and even has a little bit of stretch to it in some instances, and allows for a greater range of fit for different body types.”

Of course, there were many other modifications made to the various Helly Hansen garments as a result of Vail Resorts’ feedback, as well. Design elements like a gusset on the neck, a walkie-talkie antenna holder and loops for radios were also added, to name a few.

One of Babb’s favorite elements is called a life pocket which, for some, really lives up to its name.

“It’s an insulated pocket for your cell phone or your radio, but we’ve even had a few employees who need insulin pumps, and that life pocket allows those insulin pumps to stay warm and perform more efficiently,” Babb said.

For this year, the company has implemented the new uniforms at its five Colorado resorts, along with Whistler-Blackcomb, and by next year you can expect to see employees wearing the new Helly Hansen kits on the West Coast and Park City, as well. Full implementation across all of Vail Resorts’ 41 properties in North America, Australia and Europe is scheduled to be complete by the 2026-27 season.

Vail Mountain spokesperson John Plack, who has doubled as a new uniform model in recent months, said Babb put a level of dedication into the uniform project which will benefit workers for years to come.

“Jeff’s been working on this really hard for a very long time, and I think it’s a program that the company’s pretty proud of,” Plack said.