How Osprey Thinks About Creators, Athletes, and Authentic Brand Building

Leland Kohere joined me from the Osprey showroom in Durango, packs stacked on the wall behind him, fresh off a lunch run. He runs the athlete program, the field marketing, and all the content and social for a brand that has been making packs for more than 50 years.

This is the type of conversation I built this show for; the helpful behind the scenes stuff that we don’t often hear about. How the money actually gets allocated, which audience each piece of content is really for, and how a company with this many product categories decides where to point. He gave me all of it, including the detail that Osprey has never once put a podium incentive in an athlete contract.

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Who: Leland Kohere, marketing manager at Osprey Packs

Where: Durango, Colorado

Day job: Oversees the athlete and sports marketing program, field marketing and consumer events, and all content and social, working alongside an external agency Runner notes: Runner, skier, and surfer.

Leland has been at Osprey a little over five years. He came in as marketing coordinator, hired by Vince Mazuka, a friend from a previous life who told him years earlier that he wanted to hire him one day and eventually did. Vince has since moved to the product team overseeing the technical outdoor category.

Leland calls himself a generalist, and he meant it as a compliment, which is good because I feel the same way. The role covers athletes, events, content, and social, which gives him a working picture of how the whole company operates while still letting him go deep in a few places. He sits squarely on the brand side. A paid media agency handles performance, and he feeds both machines.

Here is what stuck with me.

Leland does not treat these as interchangeable, and he was direct about why. An influencer campaign targets specific people with large followings and strong engagement, because the point is to borrow their audience. UGC is content Osprey brings back to its own channels to speak to the audience it already has.

Change the goal and you change the criteria. For UGC he is not buying reach, he is buying craft. The best creators often do have followings, but only because good work tends to find one, but it doesn’t need to be someone with a large audience. What he needs is someone who actually knows the outdoors, knows the product, and can shoot something that holds up on Osprey’s feed or gets handed to the paid team.

The economics follow the goal. Influencer rates run far higher because you are paying for the followers. With UGC you are paying for the creative and doing everything else yourself, including paid social or email.

This is a drum I have been banging for a while, so it was satisfying to hear it from inside a brand. Leland measures UGC on impressions and engagement, on whether the content landed. He said plainly that he does not really care whether it made someone buy something, and that he would not necessarily expect it to.

If the paid team needs lower funnel D2C creative, a UGC creator can absolutely produce it, but the content will look completely different and get judged on completely different numbers.

Inside one seasonal campaign there is room for all of it. The UGC introduces the category. The email team sells the vest. Same campaign, different jobs, different scoreboards. Some brands try and stuff all parts of the funnel into one partnership. That is often a recipe for failure.

Osprey runs an athlete program, an ambassador program, and a creator program, and Leland keeps them separate on purpose (phew!). The athlete program exists to buy credibility in the categories Osprey competes in. It does not exist to buy results.

I asked about Grayson Murphy, who Osprey worked with before she went head to toe with Salomon. His answer had almost nothing to do with her world title. What drew the brand in was the group runs, the community engagement, the way she shows up at events, the fact that she is humble and people like her, which she makes it really easy to do, and that part seems to come naturally. If she had wanted to chase podiums, Osprey would have backed it. They just were not counting on it.

He traced it to the mission. Osprey builds gear to ease your journey and inspire your adventure, and that adventure might be a world championship or a 5K around the lake in your town. A brand that says that out loud cannot turn around and organize its roster around chasing podiums.

Leland is the customer. Runner, skier, surfer. His read is that people in this industry, whether they work in it or buy from it, see through fluff almost immediately, and that brands which stop showing up in person get quietly dismissed.

So Osprey builds an event calendar around the technical outdoor categories specifically, run and bike and climb and snow, and treats face to face conversation as the deliverable. He noted that fewer brands are doing this now. And that is part of the reason why it still works.

I brought up the AI study I did with Michael Rueckert, where we ran 2,200 prompts across categories without naming a single brand. One of the clearest findings was that winning one category earns you nothing in the next one. Osprey came back sixth in hydration vests and packs, appearing in 46% of answers, and fifth in water bottles and soft flasks at 37%.

Leland called prioritization the hardest part of his job, and he deals with it every season. The go to market process decides which categories get the full treatment, and campaigns get ranked A, B, or C. An A campaign gets influencer, UGC, a homepage carousel, an email program, an event, the works. Run was that campaign in 2026, with the redesigned Duro and Dyna plus the new Pro Series behind it. He already knows run will not be the focus next year.

The timing was mostly luck. The vests were three or four years in development, so trail running’s growth arrived after the product decision, not before it. Once the company saw the wave, it pushed to get the packs finished in time to ride it. And the wave is just beginning to roll. I wrote more about why following a week out in Tahoe around Broken Arrow/TrailCon/Western States.

His candid read on brands running footwear, apparel, packs, and hard goods at once: he does not know how they stay relevant across all of it, and the only real answer is time.

We landed in the same place here. One of the more interesting findings from the AI research is that earned media is quietly feeding how these models talk about brands, which means the work PR shops have been doing for 20 years suddenly matters twice. Gordon of Outside PR joked to me that he just had to stick around long enough.

Leland’s proof point is the Outdoor Market Alliance media show, where Osprey booked between 25 and 30 appointments in a day and a half. Every meeting is scheduled weeks out, so his team can research who is walking in and what they are working on. He opens each one by asking what the person actually wants to see, which is the whole difference from a trade show floor where half your conversations are strangers you could not plan for. I appreciated that one quite a lot, having just come off OMA where it was clear half the brands did no research at all.

Popfly sponsors this podcast, and I want to be transparent that Leland’s take on the platform was not something I set up (though perhaps I would have if he didn’t bring it up). Osprey is a customer, and I found out because I saw them post campaigns there and applied to (and participated in) a couple myself.

His version is worth hearing because it is operational. He got a demo from Taylor, their CEO, got set up quickly, and launched a UGC campaign for hiking products about three weeks later. Sourcing creators, contracting them, shipping product, and getting content back all fit inside that window. At the time of this recording, Osprey had run five campaigns across hiking, run, and travel.

The part he kept coming back to was creator quality. These were real outdoors people who knew the brand and understood the product, which is what makes the content usable rather than merely delivered. If you are running a creator program, Popfly is worth a look.

• Separate your creator budget from your influencer budget. They buy different things. One buys reach, the other buys craft, and paying influencer rates for UGC means overpaying for followers you are not using.

• Set the KPI before the campaign, not after. Awareness content judged on ROAS will always look like a failure. Impressions and engagement are the honest measure at the top of the funnel.

• Credibility is not the same as results. An athlete roster built around community presence outlasts one built around podium finishes, and it likely costs less to maintain.

• Category authority does not transfer. Being strong in packs earns you nothing in bottles. Every category has to be won on its own, and the only way through is sustained attention over years.

• Earned media is compounding again. PR work is now feeding what AI models say about your brand, which makes a well-run media appointment one of the better returns available.

Leland Kohere on LinkedIn. Osprey at osprey.com, and the redesigned Duro and Dyna Pro series is the product he and the athlete team spent years on.

For The Long Run is a weekly conversation about the why underneath the miles. I started it in 2019 to understand what actually keeps people running long, strong, and motivated, and it has since grown into the Long Run Labs Network. Long Run Labs is the show that grew out of it, focused on the people building the outdoor industry.

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Popfly. The creator program platform built for outdoor, travel, and adventure brands. It connects you with the largest community of adventure creators on the planet: people who actually use the gear, live the lifestyle, and have built real trust with their audiences. Affiliate links, discount codes, creator and ambassador collabs, all in one place. If you’re a brand, learn more here. If you’re a creator, sign up here.

Listen to the full conversation with Leland Kohere on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.