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Academy Sports + Outdoors
Academy Sports + Outdoors traces its origins to 1938 in Houston, Texas, founded by Jewish immigrant Max Gochman as a small army-navy surplus store before his family grew it over the following decades into a full sporting goods and outdoor recreation retail chain. The company built a particularly strong presence across the American South and Southeast, historically concentrating its store footprint in that region rather than pursuing the more nationwide store distribution some larger competitors maintained. Academy Sports + Outdoors has remained substantially family-controlled through much of its history despite going public in 2020, and the company built a reputation for a broader, value-oriented product mix spanning sporting goods, outdoor gear, and casual apparel at generally lower price points than some specialty competitors. Academy Sports + Outdoors's combination of its origins as a small Depression-era army-navy surplus store and its sustained regional dominance across the American South has made it one of the most distinctively positioned sporting goods chains in the country.
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REI
REI, short for Recreational Equipment Inc., was founded in 1938 in Seattle by a group of mountain climbers, including Lloyd and Mary Anderson, who wanted better access to quality ice axes and climbing equipment than what was then commercially available in the United States. The company operates as a consumer cooperative rather than a traditional publicly traded corporation, meaning customers can become lifetime members for a small one-time fee and receive an annual dividend based on their purchases, a structure that has remained central to REI's identity since its founding. REI became well known for its "Opt Outside" campaign, launched in 2015, in which the company closes all of its stores on Black Friday and pays its employees to spend the day outdoors instead, a deliberate rejection of the retail industry's biggest shopping day that generated significant national media attention. REI's combination of its founding cooperative ownership structure and its widely publicized "Opt Outside" Black Friday closure campaign has made it one of the most distinctively positioned outdoor and sporting goods retailers in the country.
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