Tiso Brand Guidelines: Edinburgh’s 1962 Outdoor Shop, Leith & the Outdoor Experience

A mountaineer, a climber back from Norway and a shop on Rodney Street.

Tiso is an outdoor retailer from Edinburgh. The outdoor news magazine grough reported in September 2012 that the business began when the mountaineer Graham Tiso met Maude, who had just come back from working and climbing in Norway. The couple started trading in 1962 from the back room of a boat shop, and later that year they took a shop of their own on Rodney Street in Edinburgh. The same report says Graham Tiso was a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club and helped to set up the Scottish Mountaineering Trust.

Their son Chris Tiso told Business Insider in Scotland in March 2018 that the business had very humble beginnings: a small store in Edinburgh, opened because both founders shared a passion for wild places and the mountains and saw real demand in Scotland for outdoor clothing and equipment. By the time of that interview he had run the company for 25 years.

The company later settled in Leith, Edinburgh’s port district. grough dates the Leith building to 1974, and the 2018 interview says the Leith store still has the company offices on the floor above the shop. Companies House lists the trading company, Graham Tiso Limited, as active, with its registered office in Leith; that company was incorporated in 1983.

Growth was gradual and mostly Scottish. Just Style reported in March 2004 that Tiso had opened its first standalone store in England. When the business marked fifty years in September 2012, grough counted 11 stores across Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, and described the celebration: a cairn of walking boots stacked on Calton Hill, attended by Maude and Chris Tiso.

Outdoor Experience stores and a Keswick shop.

Tiso’s larger shops trade under the name Outdoor Experience. In March 2018 Business Insider called the planned Aviemore branch “the latest evolution” of this established concept: about 12,000 square feet over a ground floor and a mezzanine, combining Tiso with its sister businesses Alpine Bikes and Blues the Ski Shop, plus a café and a soft-play area. Chris Tiso described Aviemore, which he called the adventure capital of Scotland, as “the missing piece in the puzzle” for the group, and said the company had looked at the town several times before but had not found a unit large enough to do something distinctly different there.

The same article said Aviemore would be the 15th Tiso store, a count that included the George Fisher shop in Keswick, and that it would have almost double the retail space of the Leith store. Business Insider reported on 28 September 2018 that the Tiso Aviemore Outdoor Experience had officially opened, taking the number of stores the group ran in Scotland to 13. Chris Tiso said at the opening that the store would serve the mountaineers, walkers, skiers, cyclists and nature enthusiasts who visit the area.

The group’s English outpost is in the Lake District. In July 2007 grough reported that Tiso had bought George Fisher, one of the established outdoor shops of Keswick. The shop takes its name from its founder, who had led the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team; grough describes the store as a 9,000-square-foot building on Borrowdale Road. The shop still traded as George Fisher in 2018, when Business Insider included it in the Tiso store count.

Tiso has also built a public profile around talks and expeditions. In September 2012, grough reported, it ran a Spirit of Adventure series of four lecture evenings across Scotland with adventurers it had sponsored, and more than a thousand people attended.

In the 2018 interview Chris Tiso was frank about the pressure on a specialist shop. He said customers were ever more discerning, with shorter attention spans and many more places competing for their time, and that a retailer could not stay successful by doing things the way it always had. He added that the group would judge the Aviemore store over about three years, because a destination town matures more slowly than a city high street.

How outdoor retailers present themselves.

Outdoor, camping and ski retailers sell other companies’ boots, tents and jackets alongside ranges of their own, so much of their identity lives in the shop rather than the product. Trade press coverage of the British chains returns to the same few things: the size and setting of a store, the specialist departments inside it, and the services offered at the counter, such as boot and rucksack fitting or a cycle workshop.

Store format is the clearest divide. In its 2017 review of a merger in the sector, the Competition and Markets Authority described one group of chains trading from smaller, typically high-street shops and another from larger stores, typically out of town, able to carry a broader range. Newer openings mix the two ideas: shops that put two or three of a group’s fascias under one roof, smaller “express” formats with in-store kiosks for the full range, and concessions run by specialist cycling, fishing or equestrian businesses inside a larger store.

Names carry much of the work. Several chains in this guide are named after a place or an activity rather than a founder, and several sit inside larger groups owned by listed retailers or private-equity firms, while the shopfront name stays the same. Campaigns can be timed to the season: one chain’s 2026 autumn and winter campaign came with a floor refresh across all its stores, trade press reported.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it began, who has owned it and when, and how its stores are laid out — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name under JD Sports since 2013.

The family did not keep sole control. In November 2013 grough reported that JD Sports Fashion, which already owned the Blacks and Millets chains, had bought a controlling share of the Edinburgh-based Graham Tiso group. The Tiso family kept what the report called a significant shareholding; JD’s chairman became chairman of Tiso, and Chris Tiso moved to the role of chief executive. At that point the group also owned George Fisher and Alpine Bikes. The report said the Tiso brand would remain, with its headquarters staying in Edinburgh, inside the outdoor division of JD Sports Fashion.

That arrangement has held. Business Insider noted in 2018 that JD Sports Fashion had taken its stake in 2013 and that Chris Tiso remained a significant shareholder. In November 2026 the Companies House register lists Graham Tiso Limited as active and records a JD outdoor holding company, JD Outdoors Holdings Limited, as the person with significant control, notified in October 2026. Tiso therefore trades as a Scottish name within a larger group that also runs the Blacks and Millets shops, while the trading company, its registered office and its Leith store stay in Edinburgh.

For a design guide, Tiso shows how a family name can stay on the door after a sale: the stores carry the founders’ surname, the big-format shops share one descriptive label, Outdoor Experience, and an acquired shop such as George Fisher keeps its own sign. Compare Blacks and JD Sports, which sit in the same group. For this guide we use heather, loch ink and granite grey on birch white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tiso’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.