When sports gear retailer Backcountry.com launched an expanded online community in 2008, the founders considered it a marketing experiment. But a year later, interacting with 85,000 outdoor “fanatics” has transformed the mission of his 650-employee company, says President John Bresee. The open community takes Backcountry.com’s content beyond just “what we say” and makes it all about “what they say,” says Bresee, who founded the Park City [Utah] company with CEO Jim Holland in 1996. He spoke recently to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein; edited excerpts of their conversation follow.
You and your partner founded Backcountry.com 13 years ago. Did it start out online?
Yes. We have a store in Salt Lake City, near our warehouse, because we have to have a physical location to satisfy our vendor agreements. But that’s not what we’re skilled at.
I’m a road and mountain biker and a skier, and Jim is a fanatical mountaineer and telemark skier. We began with the initial Web site because having fantastic outdoor experiences is our passion. We now have 10 specialty outdoor stores, all online, that focus on high-end camping, climbing, skiing, ice-climbing, and action sports like surfing and snowboarding. In June 2007 Jim and I sold a controlling interest in the company to Liberty Media Corp., but we still own part of the company and we’re still running things.
Your Web site already encouraged customer reviews on the products you sell. How and why did you expand customer-generated content last year?
We started the reviews in 2001, and they’ve been very powerful. But our goal was to create perfect product content, and we realized the only way to get that was to turn over as much of the content as we could to our community of users. People are so careful with their gear dollar now, because they have to make…