Several years ago, I started the blog The Observant Customer as an outlet for my observations on retailing. This new endeavor is to focus on outdoor retailing.

How do I define outdoor retailing? I suppose I should be more specific. I will focus mostly on human powered outdoor pursuits. Hiking, backpacking, skiing, snowshoeing, paddling and the like are the areas I will be looking at the most. I am not anti-hunting and fishing, but since these are outside my area of expertise and are specialties of their own, I will likely only mentioned them occasionally.

As for my expertise, I have over over 25 years of experience in outdoor retailing. My experience includes working on the sales floor with customers, as a manager in stores and in the training department of several notable outdoor retailers. Several major outdoor retailers currently use sales and service training that I developed and deployed.

I continue to be involved in outdoor activities and consider myself an avid, hiker, backpacker, XC skier, snowshoer and paddler. In the past, I have been a climber and a downhill skier.

What can you expect in the blog? I will be commenting on how to serve customers (or in many cases, how not to serve customers), points on managing retail sales, comments on outdoor retailers both good and bad and observations on the industry in general.

Thanks and happy trails!