USU alum opens outdoor retail shop in Nibley
An online outdoor equipment retailer, which was launched ten years ago by a USU student before his graduation, experienced significant growth in its first decade of business and celebrated the grand opening of its new storefront facility on Oct. 26 in Nibley, Utah.
According to store manager Josh Brundage, CampSaver.com’s new facility is its first to include both a storefront and warehouse in one building, supplying nearly every size, color and style of gear for which customers may be on the hunt.
The store also serves as CampSaver.com’s headquarters for the continued operation of its website.
As Andy Stroman, the founder and owner of CampSaver.com, neared completion of his studies in graphic design in 2002, he began contemplating potential business startups. According to Stroman, the online outdoor retail market was “immature” and “wasn’t really developed at all” at the time.
With few strong competitors in the scene, Stroman, who had gained experienced with online sales and website design working for various Cache Valley companies, decided to enlist the help of friend Dave Denley, a “self-taught” website programmer, to begin development of a new website.
Stroman said he designed the site and paid Denley to do all the “backend work” – writing the website’s coding and sequence programming and enabling it to function efficiently.
The website was launched in May 2003 and at first only sold products being held and shipped from a separate company’s warehouse – a process referred to as “drop shipping.”
“I found a fulfiller in Salt Lake, so it didn’t cost me any money. I didn’t have to go out and inventory anything,” Stroman said. “It was very inexpensive and very simple.”
That year, Stroman said he attended a number of equipment trade shows, quickly realizing he needed to begin acquiring products in his own inventory if he was ever going to gain access to all the best equipment coming out each year.
Still a student at the time, Stroman said he had to make due with what facilities he had available, using his Logan home as a warehouse to begin growing the company’s inventory.
“I started that year just bringing stuff into my house,” he said. “In the fall of 2003, I had my living room full of backpacks and stuff.”
In its first year of business, Stroman said CampSaver.com saw 1000 percent growth.
“It became apparent I had to get a warehouse and stuff,” Stroman said. “So I went ahead and rented a little space on my own and started buying direct from companies.”
For the next three years, CampSaver.com experienced “triple-digit growth,” followed by an additional 50-60 percent growth each year after that, Stroman said. In this time, the company grew online to compete with the likes of REI and Backcountry.com, which Stroman said also grew their sites to facilitate large-scale sale and distribution.
With such growth also came the necessity to seek out larger facilities. The new store is CampSaver.com’s fifth and largest physical location, Stroman said. These other locations – one of which used to be located on Main Street in downtown Logan – are no longer open.
With the new facility, Brundage said CampSaver plans to begin placing more focus on providing services for adventure enthusiasts in Cache Valley. He said the company will begin hosting free events – such 5k races and “mountain man days,” where participants learn to throw hatchets and compete in log rolling challenges – as well as offering free classes on a variety of outdoor skills, including backcountry skiing and rock climbing.
Brundage said the store’s staff, which is made up almost entirely of USU students and graduates, receives rigorous training and familiarization with all the gear that makes up the store’s 55,000-product inventory. He said the reason for this intensive training is so they may share their knowledge to help enable other people to enjoy the outdoors.
“We want this to be a place where people can actually come and learn,” Brundage said. “Because we love it so much, we want to share those things.”
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