Online Marketing Fairbanks AK

Name: Robert Wolfe
Company: Moosejaw Inc.

Be careful what you joke about -- it may turn into your livelihood. As backpacking guides after college, Robert Wolfe and a friend quipped about how they kept sending all their customers to a single store for their gear, and why can’t we get a piece of that action?

And now, 13 years later, Robert’s own outdoor-supply retailing operation, Moosejaw Inc., has become a rugged success.

“It’s not like we put together 100 spread sheets right away to see if it was feasible,” recalls Robert. “We laughed about it. When we said it, we didn’t think we’d do it.”

But Robert was an underemployed political-science graduate, so what else was he going to do to make money?

At first, Robert went the conventional retail route, opening a 2,200-square-foot store in a backwater called Keego Harbor, Michigan, with money lent by suppliers. But he sustained lots of initial lessons from the school of hard knocks.

First, his backpacking friend and partner sold out to Robert because he couldn’t stand retailing. And as he opened a second store in East Lansing, Michigan, and then a total of six stores in Michigan and Illinois, Robert ill-advisedly tried to buck the realities of retailing.

“I thought it would be cool to have Store A, B and C be different from one another,” he says. “But it’s not cool. It makes them difficult to open and operate. It means you can’t use a standardized IT [Information Technology] system from Oracle or IBM.

Author: Rich Sloan

Copyright 2009 StartupNation, LLC

Click here to read more from StartupNation