The February 2015 meeting at the Seattle headquarters of outdoor equipment retailer REI had started out as a rather unexceptional gathering—“a very traditional retail meeting,” in the words of one company executive. On the agenda: what themes and ideas to play up at the co-op’s 145 stores and on its website during the 2015 Christmas shopping season. As the brainstorming got under way, people started to throw out emotions associated with the holidays, and it soon became clear that, while many idealize the holiday season, it can also be a time of tremendous stress. 

Then someone—no one with the company can say who, exactly—tossed out a radical idea: What if REI just completely shut down on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which in the last 20 years has turned into a mass mania of consumerism? Shutter all the stores. Turn off the online sales. Let the employees spend the day playing outdoors with their friends and families. 

“Someone said, ‘I know we could never do it,’” Ben Steele, REI’s chief creative officer, told me recently. “And then we were like, ‘Well, why couldn’t we do it?’ The next response was, ‘How do we do this?’”

The answer was #OptOutside, the co-op’s successful campaign encouraging people to skip the Black Friday madness and instead spend their time recreating outdoors. In its inaugural year (2015), some 1.4 million people RVSP’d to the company’s call to spend time outdoors; 170 organizations (including the Sierra Club) helped to publicize the idea; and 1,000 state and local parks agreed to waive entrance fees that day. Altogether, the #OptOutside meme garnered some 8 billion social media and news impressions, helping to create a new alt-holiday. Ad Age has called #OptOutside “a new American tradition” and the “future of marketing.” Think of Adbuster’s “Buy Nothing Day”—only with a corporate sponsor getting in on the gig.  

“We tapped into a couple of truths,” Steele said. “One of those is that Black Friday has gotten goddamn out of control. It’s insane. It’s crazy. All we really did was shine a spotlight on what the day could be.” 

Thrilled with that success—which Steele said blew away the company’s expectations—REI again will be going entirely dark for Black Friday. This year’s experience is poised to blow away the first attempt. As of Monday, 2.1 million people have signed on to REI’s #OptOutside pledge. There are nearly 400 organizational partners this year, and even more parks have signed on to waive entrance fees. 

Steele insists that #OptOutside isn’t just a complicated media stunt, an earned-media bonanza. The effort, he said, isn’t really about the co-op’s 5.5 million member-customers or perceptions in the wider markeplace. Rather, “success is first and foremost about our 12,139 employees,” Steele said. “We are going to pay them to spend the day outside rather than pay them to spend time indoors. That’s the truest expression of us as a co-op.” 

But doesn’t this whole experiment cost REI a ton of money? Steele acknowledged that the combination of losing sales while still paying wages did lead to a “big financial hit” (though he refused to give an exact figure). But, he said, that’s OK. “At the same time, we are a co-op. And we have a different set of success metrics, and a different long-term view of what success looks like.” 

One of those metrics is encouraging employees to strike a healthy work-life balance—an ethic evidenced by the fact that the co-op has been on Fortune magazine’s list of the top companies to work for every year since 1998. 

Last year for #OptOutside, Steele went with his wife, daughter, and dog on a hike to a Seattle-area state park called Wallace Falls. It was, he said, a perfect Seattle day: cold, drizzling, and the trail packed with people. Steele said he hopes to make the Wallace Falls trek into a family tradition. His other hope is that others will opt outside, too. “I invite people to join us.”