pioneers
Backcountry.com’s John Bresee
The evolution of the outdoor gear behemoth was very deliberate and carefully planned.
I
ts beginnings can be traced to co-founder John Bresee’s awe for Utah’s legendary snow. “The storms were so intense and big. From the start, I was crazy for the snow,” Bresee says.
After college, Bresee headed West and landed a job and an apartment at Alta’s Albion Lodge. His childhood buddy and U.S. ski jumper Jim Holland relocated to Utah soon after. The two spent every minute they weren’t working backcountry skiing. Before long they began to hatch a plan. “Our first thought was opening a small store or kiosk at one of the resorts selling avalanche safety supplies,” Bresee says. But then, despite e-commerce being limited to only a handful of sites, the two began gravitating toward the Internet. With high hopes and $2,000 the two went live with
Backcountry.com in December 1996. “Of course our first sale didn’t come until two months later,” Bresee says. In addition to working on the site, the two scoured skiing message boards— the closest thing to social media in 1997—using firsthand experience to steer traffic to
Backcountry.com. Progress slowed a bit when Bresee took a job as editor for Powder magazine in Southern California. The turning point came a few years later when Bresee returned to Utah and they “expanded” to a small garage in Heber City. “The
dot.com bubble crashed and we were still standing,” Bresee said. “So I convinced Jim not to go to Wharton as he planned, we hired a couple of employees and focused full-time on
Backcountry.com,” Bresee says.
Bresee in a
Backcountry.com warehouse which stores the 1,000- plus brands sold on the site.
The two used existing Internet retailers’ mistakes to build their brand. For example, frustrated with not being able to find a phone number anywhere on
Amazon.com, they placed
Backcountry.com’s customer service line front and center on the home page. Each product was accompanied by detailed, well-written and often
glib descriptions. They hired hardworking people who lived the lifestyle they were selling. “We wrote down the lessons as we learned them and referred to them often. We were lucky, yes, but we also worked really hard and always made sure the customer would be treated the way we wanted to be treated,” Bresee says.
Backcountry.com and its sister sites see an average of 13 million unique visitors each month. Liberty Media acquired a controlling interest in
Backcountry.com in 2007. Bresee’s current projects include
geartrade.com and spending as much time as he can with his 6-year-old son.
80
skiutah.com
John Williams made fresh ocean fi sh a Utah fi ne dining staple.
Gastronomy’s John Williams
How one restaurateur turned something fi shy into something fabulous.
n the early 1970s, Idaho native and Gastronomy co-founder John Williams often pondered opening a restaurant. He marveled at how many of downtown’s forgotten buildings would make perfect spaces for high-end eateries. “I spent four years studying architecture at the University of Utah and was fascinated by the city’s historic buildings,” Williams says.
I
Getting booze at a restaurant back then was a clunky, inconvenient process involving purchasing mixers from your server and then standing in line at a counter for mini bottles or a wine split. So called private clubs were the only places where servers would bring cocktails and wine to the table.
So, a few years later Williams purchased the condemned New York Hotel, originally built in 1906, with business partner Tom Guinney. The two formed Gastronomy Inc. and opened one of Salt Lake City’s most iconic restaurants, The New Yorker. Williams oversaw the building’s renovation and restaurant design, using muted lighting, palms and deep wood accents to create a hip, classic New York night club atmosphere, right down to the white shirts and long white aprons worn by the wait staff. A menu standout, virtually from the 1978 opening night, was the fresh salmon. “Six out of 10 entrees ordered were the salmon. It was then we realized there was a great hunger for high-quality seafood here in Utah,” Williams says. He and Guinney contracted with Western Airlines (now Delta Air Lines) to fly in fresh seafood from both U.S. coasts on a daily basis. Buoyed by the New Yorker’s success, the partners opened the Market Street Grill and Oyster Bar in the early 1980s, and then renovated a fire station nearby the University of Utah to open the Broiler in 1983. In 2000, Gastronomy completed its first from-the-ground-up project with the Market Street Grill, Oyster Bar and Fresh Seafood Market in Cottonwood Heights, and has since opened another Market Street location in South Jordan. Gastronomy restaurants now serve more than 1,000 pounds of fresh fish daily to just short of a million diners every year.
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