Backcountry.com
Photography: Timothy Thimmes
Jim Holland and John Bresee give ski bums a glimmer of hope for their futures. The former ski jumper and the Alta burger slinger have risen from the ranks of seasonal, ski-centric employment to found a series of highly successful retail Web sites including Backcountry.com.
But if you think that desk jobs have diminished the amount of time the duo spends in the outdoors, think again. Jim and John make a point of using the high-tech outdoors gear they sell on their sites (“We use the gear we sell,” reads the company motto), especially if that gear involves pursuing powder caches in the backcountry.
Eight years ago, 27-year-old Jim, a two-time Olympian and former U.S. Ski Team member, was wrapping up a successful Nordic ski jumping career and watching his friends slip into unfulfilling jobs. He vowed that he would enjoy his work, and found inspiration in a class on entrepreneurship at the University of Vermont. “When the professor described those who do well as entrepreneurs,” Jim says, “it seemed like he was describing me.”
Since Jim trained in Park City in preparation for the Lillehammer Olympic Games, he was familiar with Utah’s outdoors scene, which drew him back to the Wasatch Front. Back in Utah, he founded the Web development company, Wasatch Web Works.
Meanwhile, John Bresee, Jim’s childhood friend from Norwich, Vermont, was living and working at Alta, where he founded the Wasatch County Reporter, a resort town newspaper. “I had the best year of my life living at Alta, but it wasn’t really sustainable,” John says. “I was looking for balance and access to mountains and desert and a great community. Park City was inevitable.”
After a stint as the editor of Powder magazine in California, John moved to Park City, where he and Jim ended up living together in an apartment behind the Blue Roof market. There the two friends created Backcountry.com, a Web site spin-off from the Wasatch County Reporter. The site offered backcountry enthusiasts a place to buy quality gear from people who understood their needs.
“It never would have happened if the Outdoor Retailer show wasn’t here [in Salt Lake City],” Jim says. We got media passes just to ogle the gear, but that gave us the idea to start selling avalanche gear over the Internet. It seemed like the perfect solution to ‘I don’t want to dread going to work in the morning.’”
Jim and John started Backcountry.com in 1996 with $2,000, and within its first year, the company reached profitability. “Through 2001, we were going up against big funded companies that looked like they would win,” John says.
“At the time, we were just trying to build a good business. We put our heads down and kept going, and looked up one day to find that many of our competitors had disappeared.”
Today, Backcountry.com holds a solid share of the online retail outdoors market, drawing business from serious gearheads who covet top brands such as The North Face, Rossignol and Burton.
The company’s accomplishments include seven years of triple digit growth, which ended in 2004 when the company posted only an 84 percent increase on sales of $27 million, down substantially from previous years. Backcountry.com promptly distributed a press release blaming the diminished growth numbers on the distraction of a good snow year. The site’s successes prompted the company to create new, specialized sister sites. Tramdock.com focuses on ski equipment; Dogfunk.com services snowboarders; SteepandCheap.com features one new sale item every 24 hours; and Backcountryoutlet.com offers an array of closeout bargain gear.
As a sign of the company’s incredible growth, the retailer has had to expand to new warehouse facilities three times in the past three years. The company moved its warehouse and distribution center this past May to a 207,000-square-foot building in West Valley City.
At the same time, corporate headquarters relocated to 5,700 square feet in the Redstone complex, where local architect Kurt Von Putkammer created a unique environment for outdoorsy employees. “Recognizing that we employ outdoor people, we tried really hard to make an environment where these people would feel comfortable,” John says. The new space features blue ceilings, a meandering carpet “path,” plenty of natural and recycled materials, large pictures of stunning scenery and a cutout mountain ridgeline wall.
While John says the company plans as far into the future as they dare, walking the fine line between hubris and good management, he knows he’ll continue to enjoy being an innovator in the online industry. “I like that we’re still breaking trail. We can make up our own rules.”
Jim makes optimistic predictions based on the type of employees the company attracts. “People move to this area for the same reasons we did, and therefore connect with what we’re doing,” he says. “They are the biggest secret to our success.”
These two ski bums who started a business in their apartment during the Internet boom never thought the company would be where it is today.
“We never expected to get to this size,” says John. “It would have been impossible to predict.”
“Every time I walk into our warehouse, I am respectful and appreciative of how far we’ve come,” Jim adds. “I’m still in awe of the scale that we’ve achieved and the success that we’ve had.”
Lucy Burningham is a frequent contributor to Park City Magazine.
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