Backcountry.com sales grow to $52 million in 2005
How do you follow a 2004 that saw $27.4 million in sales representing 88% YOY growth? In 2005, Backcountry.com leapt to $52 million in revenue. We rocked the warehouse crew so hard that they were crying "Uncle" ... right up until we gave them a new shiny Ferrari of a warehouse: 210,000 square feet of gear flying off the shelf heaven.
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PARK CITY, Utah — How do you follow a 2004 that saw $27.4 million in sales representing 88% YOY growth? 2004 was a good year for us, one we were proud of, but ” … not really Princeton material, now are you, Joel?” So in 2005 we all dug in and pulled harder, and the customers responded. In 2005, Backcountry.com leapt to $52 million in revenue. We rocked the warehouse crew so hard that they were crying “Uncle” … right up until we gave them a new shiny Ferrari of a warehouse: 210,000 square feet of gear flying off the shelf heaven. You could race a car through this thing … and we did, right before we put up the shelves.
Of course once one kid gets something new, then they all want something, so the engineering team got a huge pile of IBM blade servers, and then marketing got SteepandCheap.com, the skiers got Tramdock.com, the ‘boarders their own chunk of the web at Dogfunk.com, and the buyers got pretty much every cool new piece of outdoor gear in existence.
For Backcountry.com, 2005 was a monster year for building infrastructure. We invested everything we had to make the operational foundations of the company strong and now we have faith.
So what’s up in ’06? Well … 2006 is “The Year of the Customer”. There are enough shiny new toys for us (for a while anyway), now we’re getting some serious religion about making the customer the center of our universe. We always thought we were showing them The Love, but we discovered some warts, some ways in which the customer wasn’t coming first, and now we’re out to change that. How? You’ll see soon enough. (That’s our forward looking statement.)
When people ask us about our growth secrets, we sort of scratch our heads, because there aren’t any, but we can’t pitch the business media stories about that … not that we haven’t tried. At Backcountry.com we all work until it hurts and then we work some more. We’ve been blessed by good fortune, but much of it has been because we are all right there working our hearts out. It turns out that sweat is the magic elixir for success (Which explains my bad grades in school).
We hire great people and we ask great things of them. This year, we’re saying to the crew, “Help us make our customers the kings and queens of Backcountry.com.” We think we know how it’s going to go; if you focus 100% on the customer, the rest will follow. Judging by how late this news release is, it looks like we’re on track for another busy year.
About Backcountry.com: “We use the gear we sell”
With offices in Park City, Utah and Salt Lake City, Utah, Backcountry.com (http://www.backcountry.com/) is an e-commerce business that sells performance outdoor gear for backcountry excursions, including backpacking, climbing, skiing, snowboarding, trail running and adventure travel. Backcountry.com also operates BackcountryOutlet.com, Dogfunk.com, Tramdock.com, and SteepandCheap.com. Founded in 1996, the company has been recognized as a Top 50 Web site by Internet Retailer Magazine, one of the top 25 retailers by Outdoor Business and is a member of the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing privately held companies.
Source: Backcountry.com
CONTACT: Mike Geraci, +1-307-734-7575, for Backcountry.com
Web site: http://www.backcountry.com/
