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Big 5 Sporting Goods
Big 5 Sporting Goods traces its origins to 1955, when five childhood friends who had served together in World War II opened a small Army-surplus-style store in Southern California, eventually growing it into a regional sporting goods chain concentrated primarily across the Western United States. The company built its identity around smaller-format neighborhood stores compared to the larger warehouse-style footprint of some national competitors, positioning Big 5 as a more convenient, easily accessible option for everyday sporting goods needs in the communities it served. Big 5 built a long-standing reputation for weekly print advertising circulars featuring rotating doorbuster deals, a marketing approach that became closely associated with the brand's identity as a value-focused regional sporting goods retailer. Big 5 Sporting Goods's combination of its origin story among five World War II veteran friends and its sustained smaller-format neighborhood store model has made it one of the most distinctively regional 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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