The rope-team spirit: a meeting with the founders of a French outdoor brand manufactured in Europe
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Between two gusts of wind and in a refuge perched high in the mountains, Lagoped's three founders look back with warmth on the brand's beginnings, their meeting, and their commitments. Christophe Cordonnier, Pierre Derieux, and Julien Désécures look back on the birth of a French outdoor brand manufactured in Europe, born of a friendship and a shared passion for the mountains.
Pierre and Christophe: the two high-altitude city dwellers
Pierre, the mountains as a school of life
It all begins with a paradox. Christophe and Pierre are Parisians, but Parisians who escape whenever possible. For Pierre Derieux, a training strategy consultant, the mountains are not a luxury but a school of life: he prefers the challenges faced with friends at altitude to the city dinners he rarely attends. For the past ten years, he has also accompanied teenagers from Seine-Saint-Denis who are struggling at school on mountain outings, a community commitment that shapes the way Lagoped thinks about access to nature.
Photo credit Alex Pichon
Christophe, providing a concrete response to raw-material extraction
Christophe Cordonnier's journey is one of a gradual awakening. A former expert in commodities finance, he spent twenty years observing industrial extraction on a global scale, resource depletion, and the social impact of mines. This experience left him with a simple conviction: the current consumption model has reached its limits.
For Christophe, Lagoped is the concrete response to this realization. His expertise allows him to steer the brand with one obsession: proving that technical performance and restraint can go hand in hand. He did not become an entrepreneur to sell more, but to make better products, harnessing resources already in circulation rather than extracting new ones.
Julien: from engineer to mountain guide
If Lagoped has its feet on the ground (and in the snow), it is largely thanks to Julien. His path is not that of a solitary mountaineer, but that of a man who had to move away from the peaks to better understand that he could not live without them.
For Julien, the mountains are a mother tongue. “My great-grandfather was already climbing in the mountains in the 1920s,” he says. From the age of 3, he climbs to mountain refuges; at 7, he completes his first mountaineering route in the Écrins massif. Yet as a child, guides do not inspire him: he sees them as “rustic peasants”, far removed from the modern image of a top-level athlete.
After studying engineering in Lyon, an accident during his national service derails his plans and puts his guide training on hold. Julien is then parachuted into Paris, working as a computer engineer in La Défense. That is where he experiences a genuine sensory shock. He describes this period as a plunge into the film Blade Runner:
“You take the metro, and it is dark. You work all day in an office, and it is gray. You leave, and it is dark. You have no reference point for the passing of time or the changing seasons.”
This stark contrast with the Alps acts as a wake-up call. As soon as he can, he completes his training and leaves behind the engineer's suit for a guide's jacket. He has now been working up there for 26 years.
According to Julien, being a guide is not about adrenaline or "pushing yourself to the limit", terms he gladly leaves to marketing. For him, the mountains are an exercise in absolute concentration:
- Eliminating the superfluous: “You are so focused on what you are doing that everything else disappears. Your entire life comes down to one mission: climb up and come back down alive.”
- Radical honesty: In the mountains, you cannot pretend. The rock face acts as a mirror of our abilities and fears.This is the "truth" he wanted to instill in Lagoped.
Photo credit Alex Pichon
Pierre also points out that his friend does more than guide clients in the mountains. He is a passionate guide committed to understanding the high-mountain environment, contributing to it in two ways:
- Writing guidebooks. The author of seven reference works, he has a highly precise knowledge of the terrain. Writing a guidebook means knowing how to decipher every movement in the landscape to guide others; a precision he now applies to the ergonomics of Lagoped clothing.
- Weather routing: Julien advises on international expeditions. This ability to read the invisible and anticipate the elements is crucial: it ensures that Lagoped products are designed to meet the most unpredictable conditions, where mistakes are not an option.
Within the trio, Julien is the one who brings technical rigor. He does not merely wear the clothes; he dissects them. Within the trio, he also manages relationships and field feedback with the guide community, a demanding audience that Christophe sums up wryly: “Guides only listen to guides.”
A climbing partnership born by chance, on Alpine trails
If Lagoped exists, it is thanks to a coincidence. Pierre and Christophe, strangers to each other, crossed the Alps independently with their respective families, slept outdoors, and carried their freeze-dried meals.
“We ran into another madman who was doing the same thing as us with his kids.”
By chance, they crossed paths twice in a row that same summer, in the middle of nowhere. The climbing partnership was born. Pierre later introduced Julien to Christophe on a sunny terrace in Sallanches. The team was complete.
The brand’s name was born from a meeting at the Fond d’Aussois refuge, not far from the Dent Parrachée. “We wanted a name connected to nature. I saw these birds in the snow for the first time up there; they sleep in little holes in winter. It’s the animal that truly inhabits the mountains,” Christophe explains. The rock ptarmigan, a bird that changes its plumage with the seasons to adapt, became the totem of a brand that also wants to work with constraints rather than ignore them.
Photo credit Sébastien de Danieli
A French outdoor brand made in Europe, born from a refusal to extract
Originally, the project aimed for fully bespoke production: manufacturing only on demand, or even one piece at a time, to completely eliminate the problem of unsold goods and overstock, a scourge of the textile industry. Incubation at Outdoor Sports Valley led the model to evolve. The trio quickly understood that to convey a powerful environmental message, they needed a strong, recognizable brand capable of reaching a broad audience. Lagoped would not offer individual bespoke production, but would retain the essence of this rigor: manufacturing the most accurate quantities possible, in Europe, with complete traceability from yarn to garment.
Christophe’s industrial assessment shaped the project’s technical choices from the very beginning.
“When we eliminate the extraction of new materials, we eliminate 80% of a garment’s environmental impact.”
Lagoped draws three refusals from this, adopted as early as 2017, long before these issues became widely known.
Zero extraction, with recycled materials such as wool and polyester.
Zero pollutants, with a total refusal of PFAS.
Zero waste, with European manufacturing and clothing designed to last and be repaired rather than replaced.
The details of the sixteen criteria that make up the products' eco-score and the reasons for choosing PFAS-free are explained in depth elsewhere on the blog.
Photo credit Alex Pichon
Durability as the only fashion
For Julien, the field expert, Lagoped must remain irreproachable: he tests, criticizes and pushes the products to their limits before they reach stores.
"We buy a jacket to use it for a long time. We don't change color every year to follow fashion."
When asked to define the brand in one word, the three founders' answers both differ and converge. Julien answers "the beautiful bird, the animal that inhabits the mountain." Pierre answers "truth, friendship and roping-up spirit." Christophe answers "freedom, the freedom to choose one's path, as in the mountains, but with the responsibility to get the rope team out." Three words, one direction.
Bringing this high standard to the technical wardrobe also means understanding why every Lagoped jacket is designed to last rather than follow a seasonal trend. It is a French outdoor brand that cannot be reduced to a place of manufacture. It is an attempt to weave a metaphor: that of a garment whose thread is as strong and supportive as the rope linking three friends on a glacier.
Interview by Alex Pichon, photographer and videographer.
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