Why a Small Business Owner Built a Climbing Gym—Then Gave It Away for Free

Baptiste Rouch didn’t fly to Vietnam to climb. He came to keep a promise.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Nival, his young climbing apparel brand, was barely one year old. There were no investors, no well-oiled marketing team, and certainly no comfortable financial cushion that would allow him to take some time off. Every sale mattered. Every delay rippled. And every day he spent away from his home in Annecy, France, its future thinned.

But in early 2024, as the 30-year-old stepped into the half-finished concrete room at Maison Chance, a nonprofit boarding school for orphans and underprivileged kids in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, he knew it would be worth it.

This was the promise he’d come to keep—born from a grounded, quiet understanding he’d come to years earlier: that he would one day return to Vietnam and build something lasting for kids whose beginnings mirrored his own.

“They remind me of what I could have been in a different circumstance,” he wrote on his Instagram.

For the next three months, Rouch single-handedly oversaw the construction of Maison Chance’s first climbing gym, coaxing it up from the bare floor, hand-painting the walls, and setting routes with donated holds. It was a lengthy, exhausting and isolating process. The holds were slow through the mail, and clothing sales dried up. “During that time, Nival’s financial health collapsed,” he says. “This almost pushed us into bankruptcy.”

Still, Rouch stayed. His promise mattered more than the risk.  “From a professional and business perspective, it was a very bad idea,” he says. “But I followed my heart.”

Underneath it all, the where mattered just as much as the why, because Maison Chance had never been just another NGO.

Maison Chance, which means “The Lucky House” in French, grew out of a moment in 1993, when Swiss-born philanthropist Aline ‘Tim’ Rebeaud met a boy abandoned in a psychiatric hospital in southern Vietnam and realized she couldn’t walk away. What started as a single act of care eventually became a full-fledged nonprofit recognized by the Vietnamese government in 1998, dedicated to giving orphans and people with disabilities a chance at a stable, supported life in and around Ho Chi Minh City. Through its various programs, it provides free housing, medical care, education and job training, offering residents not just practical support, but a real path toward independence.

Under different circumstances, Rouch could have been one of these residents. He was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1993 and adopted as an infant by a French couple, then raised in southern France—a childhood lived at a distance from Vietnam, but never quite separated from it.

He first tried climbing as a teenager at Lycée Fabert in Metz, though it didn’t immediately stick. Years later, he found his way back to the sport with a different kind of attention, drawn to the quiet problem-solving and the sense of belonging it offered. As he spent more time in gyms across France, he started noticing how little of the gear actually reflected what climbers needed. That gap, paired with an entrepreneurial impulse, eventually became Nival: a small, sustainability-minded climbing brand built around durable, technical clothing made from recycled materials. Climbing shapes most of his life now: his work, his routines, and the charitable projects he’s slowly building toward in Vietnam.

“By building the climbing gym inside their center, we could ensure that it would be used every week as part of their regular, supervised sports activities,” he says. For him, returning decades after his adoption to share his sport with underprivileged children carried a sense of finality—like closing a door that’s been quietly left open. “It’s why this project resonated with me,” he says. “Topics related to childhood here naturally do.”

Before the gym at Maison Chance existed, Rouch started small, on a personal mission to share his love of climbing with Vietnam, and his love of Vietnam with climbing. From 2022 to 2023, he organized free climbing events for children in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi: simple, improvised climbing sessions at a local gym with borrowed equipment and volunteer help. “At the start, we organized more than four events, allowing around 100 children to try climbing for the first time,” he says. For many, this was more than a sport, it was a new sensation entirely: agency, problem-solving, and play.

“It helps them build self-confidence, coordination and the ability to manage fear,” he says. “It encourages teamwork, focus, and perseverance.”

In July 2024 the gym at Maison Chance finally opened, and their numbers multiplied. Climbing was embedded in their weekly schedule, more than a one-off treat, but a real sport ingrained in everyday life. What began as a handful of small events grew into a steady source of confidence, community and joy.

“Today, more than 200 children climb every week as part of their sports activity, guided by a sports instructor in the facility we built,” he says.

Rouch’s long-term vision—the steady expansion of climbing access in Vietnam—depends heavily on his ongoing effort and partnerships with local climbing orgs across the country. He knows that change won’t happen overnight.

Climbing in Vietnam is still in its early days. Fewer than ten commercial gyms exist across the country, mostly tucked into the major hubs of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. On real rock, the strongest draw remains Cat Ba Island, with its 200-plus bolted routes and oh-so-Instagrammable deep-water solos, along with newer limestone caves and crags still under development. The competitive scene is in its infancy: Vietnam has no athletes in the IFSC World Cup nor on the Olympic stage. Altogether, the climbing community is sparse but active, a fraction of the millions who climb in the U.S. or Canada—largely sustained by tourists, a few dedicated expats, and a small core of locals carrying the torch.

“It will take at least thirty years to truly change climbing in Vietnam,” Rouch says. “The ideal outcome would be to one day send the first Vietnamese athlete to the Olympic Games, but we’re pretty far from that.”

As a climbing brand owner, Rouch’s hands-on version of philanthropy is an outlier. Building a full climbing facility required months of construction, specialized materials, and a financial risk that even he admits Nival couldn’t keep absorbing—especially since his presence sustains the day-to-day operations of a small business.

For bigger brands, however, adopting even a small part of Rouch’s approach could shift climbing away from its increasingly pay-to-play model. Imagine if The North Face, Patagonia, or Black Diamond sponsored the construction of one free climbing gym per year in under-resourced areas and recruited monthly volunteers to set routes.

The ripple effect would be undeniable: wider access, stronger local climbers, more invested stewardship of nearby crags, and a generation of kids who don’t have to buy their way into the sport. It would also, though I hate to admit it, probably bring in a few repeat customers.

As Rouch puts it, “Many outdoor brands produce clothing in countries like Vietnam but don’t necessarily help develop the sport where their products originate. I want to take a different approach—create value locally, give back, and help climbing grow here.”

In 2026, Rouch plans to do something similar, markedly smaller, but with the potential for further reach. He plans to build a “child-friendly Kilter Board,” that can be installed directly inside orphanages. Lower, softer, and endlessly adjustable, without requiring setters, large budgets, or dedicated coaching. “This format is much easier to duplicate and scale,” he says.

He hopes to begin with Les Enfants du Dragon (“Children of the Dragon”), another orphanage outside Ho Chi Minh City. If the prototype works, he says, access to climbing could spread anywhere a spare wall exists—as long as companies like Nival are willing to send them.

Despite the setbacks, the strain, and the uncertainty of each new project, Rouch remains committed to the slow work of building something meaningful in Vietnam. He isn’t trying to reform the entire outdoor industry or transform an entire country overnight. His mission is smaller, quieter, and no less sincere.

“Climbing has given me a lot, and Nival Impact is my way of giving something back. I do most of this on my own because it has to be genuine and aligned with who I am. You cannot force people to join your personal mission, but they can still take part in it in their own way,” he says.

“I am trying to improve a small part of the world in my own way, with the resources I have.”

And for the hundreds of children now climbing each week, that small part means everything.

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