Outdoor Retailer - July 2017 - 73

2010s

Dan Nordstrom

n experienced mountaineer, Dan
Nordstrom grew up in a retail family and sought plenty of adventures.
After all, his ancestor, who started
the famed department store in Seattle in 1901,
immigrated to the U.S. from Sweden and
earned his fortune in the Yukon Gold Rush. And
nearly a century later, when Dan Nordstrom
bought Outdoor Research in 2003, he was already familiar with the brand's mountaineering goods from his own experience in the wild.
As CEO, he came in with two ideas that became lasting principles. "Outdoor Research
was on the brink of bankruptcy and drifting
into irrelevance at that time. It was a major
turnaround project," he says. "Our goals were
to return the brand to relevance, while creating
a great work environment along the way."
The moving goalpost of brand relevance
has kept him, and Outdoor Research, adapting. He credits that flexibility to avoiding the
institutional lock-in that occurs at larger companies. Nordstrom sees his brand occupying a
Goldilocks position among other manufacturers. "Relative to the big guys, we're small and
scrappy, and relative to the little guys, we seem
to have a lot of resources," Nordstrom says.
That "scrappy underdog" mentality is a bit
of motivational trick to compete against larger
companies: Nordstrom also acknowledges that
every great company started small and grew by
the smart and effective use of its resources.

Outdoor Retailer 35th Anniversary

"The reformers inside bureaucracies need
outside voices demanding change."
Perhaps growing up in a retail family gave
Nordstrom a zoomed-out perspective of technology's disruption of the retail landscape.
When he discusses changes in the market, he
lists horse and buggies, trains bringing the
Sears catalog, and cars making malls and specialty retail shops possible. With overbuilt retail
space in the U.S., he says it was inevitable that
the Internet would kill off some big box stores.
"For the industry, the future is the rise of the
younger entrepreneurs who are going to rede-

THE BIG NAME
WITH SOUL
Outdoor Research's outspoken
owner Dan Nordstrom is a core
athlete from a famed retail
family-and he maintains that
you can only build an established
brand by looking forward.
Written By M.T. Elliott

fine how it all works, and you're seeing that," he
says. "EVO.com is redefining the specialty ski
shop in a really profound way."
Some of Nordstrom's big adventures, like skiing the Grand Teton, are now standard proving
grounds. The Internet has made researching a
route a matter of clicks, and the gear is lighter
and faster. Yet Nordstrom derides any notion
that today's 20- and 30-somethings are not taking on hardcore objectives "They do, they just
do them so fast. What used to take four days can
be done in a day-and-a-half," he says.
Beyond the company, Nordstrom's work
with the Coalition for Outdoor Access (COA,
formerly the Outdoor Access Working Group)
is a methodical approach to changing public
lands policy, a kind of activism he sees a permanent need for the industry. He's a little surprised by the how poorly past outdoors groups
did on Capitol Hill, in part because the insular
community thinks of itself as being quite active.
He believes the broad scope of the group creates a political footprint that, combined with
sophisticated language used by the COA, represents a mature organization that some in government have been waiting on.
"We've had a stunning response from within
land management agencies," Nordstrom says.
"The system is all screwed up, not through political intent, but by decades of micro decisions
left unchecked. The reformers inside bureaucracies need outside voices demanding change."
Nordstrom can ruffle feathers within the industry, too. When brands called for a boycott of
Outdoor Retailer, he responded with an op-ed
defense for attending. The debate is nuanced,
and he largely agrees with the boycott's sentiment, but sees a longer course of action. Mainly,
some of the biggest industry voices and nonprofits, like OIA, are funded by the trade shows.
He notes an unspoken context at play, with
some brands using the boycott as cover to duck
out for a year and save money. "I think that people also just assume that these trade shows are
permanent institutions, and that's 100 percent
wrong," Nordstrom says. The Super Show vanished and Action Sports Retailer has dwindled.
"We need to be careful, frankly." O.R.

35th Anniversary 2017 / OUTDOOR RETAILER 73

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Outdoor Retailer - July 2017

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