All in the Family: Todd and Megan Frank worked together to launch resale.
Desaulniers launched Peak as a traditional specialty outdoor retailer and a full-service bike shop. In 2017, he decided to expand the business by open- ing a consignment store, the Annex. “I had an unoccupied storefront right next door—it was just sitting there waiting for something,” he says. He got the inspiration for consignment at a Grassroots show, sitting next to Deek Heykamp from Next Adventure. He thought, “I could do this—I’ve even got the space.” It’s grown steadily ever since. “It’s really taken on a life of its own,” he says. In Bellingham, Washington, ski, mountaineering, and out- door shop Backcountry Essen- tials buys gear from consumers outright and thrives selling to the dedicated outdoor com- munity in the university town. “We’ve been doing used gear since we started, going on 20 years now. It’s always been part of our model,” says owner Chris Gerston. “Early on, I thought we’d be at about one-third, but used gear has settled around 15–20% of our annual sales. It used to be closer to 20–22%, but that drop isn’t because used
I f you want an idea of how independent outdoor specialty retail shops could evolve moving into the future, stop in your local record shop. Vinyl looked truly dead in the 1990s, but in the late 2000s it began to rise from the dead as customers sought out tangible products in a streaming world and yearned for the simple pleasure of flipping through the stacks looking to be surprised by the perfect find (an original Andy-Warhol-designed copy of The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers with a working zipper on the cover perhaps? The 13th Floor Elevators’ Easter Everywhere ?). The resurgence of vinyl shows that shoppers still want the experi- ence of retail. To take it a step further, the record shop also shows how new and used products can be merchandised and sold together without one overshadowing the other. Up front, hot items like Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and Jeff Tweedy’s Twilight Override bring in fans of those musicians’ brands. If you want to dig into The Stones’ cat- alog you’ll find just-pressed new vinyl alongside used records—the choice is yours. And in the back, you can rummage through bins of albums that just arrived from an estate sale. Now all you need to do is envision the same dynamic in outdoor retail and you begin to get an idea of just how important used gear—call it resale or repurposed to make it sound more upscale—can be to a vibrant outdoor store and, even more so, to a dedicated outdoor community. What’s more, reselling and repurposing used gear represents a valuable revenue stream that can carry retailers through tough times. Immune from tariffs, aligned with a sustainable ethos, and appealing to young people (as well as outdoor dirtbag culture), the resale market is on fire. In 2023, the Grassroots Podcast reported that, “according to the National Association of Resale Professionals, the U.S. secondhand and resale market is forecasted to reach up to $53 billion by the end of 2023 and double that by 2026. And almost three-quarters of retail executives said they currently offer or are open to providing secondhand goods to their consumers. On top of that, 60% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers said they look for items secondhand before buying new.” Those numbers can’t be ignored. Indeed, many of the industry’s iconic outdoor retail shops began as nothing more than consign-
ment shops. And others, such as Boulder, Colorado’s Neptune Mountaineering, who launched a consignment business this year, are looking to the resale market to boost the bottom line. The beauty of it all? There’s no one way a business has to go into the resale business: From featuring a few racks of apparel, to putting a consignment business into the basement, to buying used gear outright and selling it, any effort adds to a shop’s profitability. “The model works. Just look at the GOA members who are doing it successfully,” says Larry Desaulniers, owner of Peak Bike & Outdoor and Peak Sports Annex in Corvallis, Oregon.
14 GRASSROOTS STORIES
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