RETAILING
A Retailer in Business for 70 Years: Their Secret Sauce for Success by Candice Landau , Freelance Writer and Underwater Photographer, NC
F OUNDED IN 1956 and now operated by its second generation, this Oregon dive shop has lived through booms, busts, and a pandemic. Here’s how owner Michael Hollingshead keeps the doors open. When Eugene Skin Divers Supply (ESDS) opened its doors in 1956, recreational scuba was in its infancy. There were no dive computers, no buoyancy compensators, and no certification
room of an appliance store a couple of blocks from where it sits today. His mother worked the counter during the day, answering the phone and filling tanks. His father, an industrial machinist, a World War II Marine, and ‘a very hard worker,’ according to Hollingshead, kept the business going on nights and weekends until the mid-1960s, when it finally became a full-time operation.
standards. Most of the dive shops that would one day become its competitors had not yet been imagined. Seventy years later, nearly all of those shops are gone while ESDS is still here, still independent, still family-run, and by the sometimes brutal standards of the dive industry, still thriving. The man behind the counter is Michael Hollingshead, the second generation of his family to run it, alongside his wife, Diana. The shop sits in Eugene, Oregon, a place better known as ‘Track Town USA’ for the Olympic Trials and other elite track-and-field events it hosts. Every retailer who's weathered the highs and lows of running a small business, and who hears ESDS has been in business for 70 years, eventually asks the same question: what's the secret? It isn't a lu- crative inheritance, and it isn't access to gin-clear water. If anything, it's the op- posite. The water off the Oregon coast stays below 50 degrees for much of the year, and there’s no benefactor under- writing the shop. In fact, the stuff that keeps it in business may seem to many,
Hollingshead grew up in the midst of it all. “We didn't have daycare or things like that back then,” he says, “so my mom basically raised me in the store. I grew up playing with scuba gear as toys.” By age 9, he was cleaning up and patching neo- prene boots and gloves for a quarter an hour. When the shop's manager moved on in the late 1970s, Don – ready to step back and travel – gave his 19-year-old son a choice. He asked if this was the life he wanted, or if he’d rather be doing something else. Hollingshead chose the shop. Shortly thereafter, he took another step that would be instrumental in helping the business save money. “I became an instructor in 1979 because I felt that it was imperative we try to control our costs. When you don't pay yourself for teaching, it's one way of keeping your revenue stream up.” The shop started under NAUI and be- came a PADI store around 1972, early enough for the shop to receive a PADI store number Hollingshead still grins about today: 911. “Don't worry,” he tells customers, “it's not for that reason.”
Diana & Michael Hollingshead
entirely unglamorous. The good news? Hollingshead believes his success is replicable and he wants to share it with others. Raised on a regulator. The store began as a hobby that got out of hand. Holling- shead's father Don and a partner, bought an air compressor, picked up a little gear, pulled in some friends, and ran the whole operation out of a garage. By around 1960, his father bought out the partner and moved the business into the back
Evolve slowly, and on your own terms. Walk the floor of ESDS and you get glimpses of the past: a black-and-white photograph of Don from the early days, a shiny brass commercial diving helmet, and a glass cabinet filled with curiosities from beneath the surface, including old regulators and a porthole still covered in barnacles. All of it sits alongside new dive equipment. In the early years there was almost nothing to sell beyond a
26 | SCUBA DIVING INDUSTRY
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