Case study · Outdoor e-commerce
Building an outdoor brand from $10,000.
An import and distribution business in a market owned by giants, financed by its own inventory, and rebuilt from the ground up after we walked away from its biggest vendor.
The challenge
Compete with giants on no capital.
Overland and outdoor gear is a market owned by big distributors with deep inventory and buying power. My partner and I started with $10,000 between us. We couldn't compete on scale, so we competed on knowledge of the gear and the people who use it.
The approach
Inventory that pays for itself.
I became the US importer and distributor for an international outdoor brand and added other lines over time. We sold through a Shopify store and a dealer program. A local 3PL handled most fulfillment, and we ran our own warehouse for bulk orders, overflow storage, and direct customer service.
Cash was the constraint on everything. I ran the business so inventory financed itself: turn the product and collect before the supplier's bill came due. Growth never required capital we didn't have, and it shipped to customers across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
The hard call
Walking away from 90% of revenue.
Our largest vendor, about 90% of revenue, stopped being a good fit for how we wanted to run the business, so we walked away. Rebuilding a stocked business from scratch would have taken more capital and time than we could deploy before it hurt. I used the vendor relationships I'd built to move to full dropship.
The new model cut our overhead and the capital and time the business required, and that freed capital funded HYNTR, our apparel line.
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