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worth the click. |
I do my best to make sure the correct photo, price and copy are shown. But...sometimes I make a mistake. In the event of any such mistake, I reserve the right to charge the correct price, to ship the correct item, or to correct the mistake. However, you will be notified at the time you order and...I beg your pardon.I find the first person voice really annoying in that last sentence because of how it relies on some kind of assumptive sense of chivalry...companies shouldn't be looking for that kind of first person politeness! Oh, who knows. Maybe I'm just the wrong demographic, that this guy is to people who voted for George Bush what "J. Peterman" is for my latte-swilling crowd. And while their site is still kind of junky, its JPGs oddly compressed and its layout forever stuck in the mid-90s, it looks to have some decent prices. (though I've seen some PDAs etc in "electronics" that are complete ripoffs...) And in looking on Youtube for any mention of Sportsman's Guide, I was surprised to see a fairly forward looking strategy, a whole youtube channel of spots, like this spot for a magic kit: It's cute, not too polished but maybe that helps reach out to their audience... and they are a cost conscious company. So anyway, that's Sportsman's Guide. Hell, I'm half tempted to buy some hiking poles. Toy of the Moment Roadkill Stuffed Animals. Flattened viscera was never so cute!
So in October of 1999 I got to travel to St. Paul, Minnesota to explain the weird inbred computer language we had recoded The Sportsman's Guide website in. I'm surprised that my journal indicates it was October, because my strongest memory is how cold it was...bitingly ice cold, but I was grateful for that, because The Sportsman's Guide offices are right across the street from this: 
These are stockyards. These are where the cows we eat go to die, and I imagine the smell must be awful in summer. But you know, fine, it's alright, it's not like I'm a vegetarian. But still, this truck... 
This truck seemed to be permanently stationed there... in fact I think I see it in this Google maps view. The truck is at the end of a raised conveyor belt. All day long former bits of cows go drip, drop, plop into the truck. So I got the tour of the Sportman's facility. They had just put in a new automated conveyor/scanning system, and my main host (I forget his name, some manager) had come up with the design and implementation and was rightfully proud of it. (Their warehouse with the system still features prominently in their advertising, more on that tomorrow.) I was duly impressed, especially knowing the challenges people on the hardware side of things must face. But that wasn't my last bit of culture shock. To be fair, I was kind of sheltered, the kid of clergy who had gone to a fancy-ish school in the Northeast and then was on his second white-collar job. Still, the amount of lockdown for the restrooms, along with posted warnings that anyone found writing graffiti there would be fired, was jarring, a reminder of a blue collar way of life I didn't know much about. (This was for the warehouse workers; the big banks of cubbies for the folks handling the calls was its own special kind of sould-draining-ness.) I was also surprised, just based on geography and I guess climate, at how many Latino workers were there, I thought that was something you'd mostly see on the coasts. The folks whom I was there to train were pretty good guys. It was a bit depressing, just because you could see in their eyes how you didn't have a lot of options when you wanted to do high-tech stuff in that part of the country, but they seemed to be getting by. (This was somewhere in the middle of the dot-com thing, and even though I wasn't (yet) at one of those Aeron chairs kind of places, I could tell I had been relatively spoiled.) The biggest shock was yet to come: a trip to Sportsman's Guide executive country! Shock #1: the paneling. Again, maybe it was the contrast with Boston corporate land, but seeing all the high muckity-mucks hanging out in what looked like the finished half of your parents' basement was odd. Shock #2: the President of the company (Gary Olen) was out that day but his office... I think I saw more bear pelts and deer heads in that room than I have since. (At least it hid the paneling.) Shock #3: the VP who was in, a woman who I guess was head of technology, had a pyramid of cigarette butts on her desk that would have made a crowd of tiny, tiny Egyptian slaves proud. So, I've already mentioned the "best beer buddy" prose all the catalogs are written in, but the fact is there's something to it, I guess they do a fair amount of product testing there, and I got the impression that hunting trips were kind of a bonding thing for the upper echelons, and to be "one of the boys" this VP had to make a trip. Hence, the deer head on her office wall: "Yeah, that was the one time I went hunting. But it was a good kill, no kill regret all..." Yikes! Ok, fine, I eat meat, hunting is a different culture that I can respect, etc etc but... shouldn't, like, the concern about HAVING kill regret act as your little Jimminy Cricket telling you that this is something you shouldn't be doing? The trip was OK despite the cold. (And I still have a photo of the local bar advertising the weekly "Meat Raffle" - again, there's my over-privileged snarky self being inappropriately amused.) I stayed at a hotel that was a refurbished mini-castle, and got to visit the famous Mall of America and ride a roller coaster inside. I went to Planet Hollywood there (not having enough guts to bring back a business receipt for "Hooters") and passed up the opportunity to buy a Robert Smith jersey (who had been the football star of my high school, but always in Randy Moss' shadow when he played with the Vikings.) Tomorrow: "no snark regret at all"?
Two quotes from the interviewers stood out for me... You've probably seen our website, and as you can see, it looks pretty shitty. That's pretty much how it's going to stay.and then on their target audience: Men from around age 30-40 with a little extra money who like buying gadgets and aren't too concerned if it doesn't work too well.because when I put those two concepts together in the context of my professional history, one name rung out: 
The year was 1999. (At the risk of getting ahead of myself in the story, my proposed slogan for their ammo catalog then was Ammo @ Sportsman's Guide: "Let's shoot our way through Y2K"(tm)) I was working for "Banta Integrated Media"... <geek>Oy, what a company! Back when they were "New Frontiers Information Corp" they were pioneers in dynamic websites, claiming to have invented the Virtual Server patch for sun machines that let one machine act as the webserver for various domains. In fact they were such early innovators they had their own templating language that they clung to even after industry standards emerged, until they decided to switch - to a new in-house language based on Reverse Polish Notation. Not being a big fan of HP calculators I plotted my exit.</geek> "Banta IM" had been bought by the big (now defunct, huh!) midwestern printing company Banta. That gave my company some strange, corn-fed bedfellows, companies that I assume did their printing through Banta and were looking to have their web presence. The Sportsman's Guide is, as far as I can tell, pretty much a "midwest" thing. Part of the issue was that they already had a web presence; a straight-forward retelling of their print catalogs in Microsoft code. The first task was to port their existing website to our own technology. They really didn't want to make it look any better, and they stuck to their guns that their website should just be a big mirror of their multiple catalogs. The first part of that made life little fun for me, who had to do the port. I learned a valuable lesson though; when they turned the firehose from their hammered Windows NT boxes to our inhouse solution, our server went down, hard. The volume was relatively enormous, and we had a major failure of due diligence in testing how our stuff scaled. <geek>The emergency fix for that was kind of cool, something to talk about on future interviews: we discovered the problem was with the DB queries, and realized that that each catalog page had a distinct URL that we could use as the basis of a rough-and-ready homebrew cache.</geek> The second part made life no fun for our design group (who had ambition; they wanted to kind of segment themselves off as "216design.com", some play on the Netscape color safe palette) Every month 2 or 3 catalogs would come out that they had to make into webpages, grabbing the artwork, fixing up the text markup, and correlating the item numbers. 
TOMORROW: Kirk Visits the Frozen Wasteland
Video of the Moment --Ruby and Lesley Rankine singing for Mountain Dew in the late 90s. One of the joys of youtube is unearthing some bit of pop-culture ephemera you thought was gone forever -- I remember asking about this video on Usenet, trying to get the group and/or singer, I really dig this ad - a bit too much w/ the 90s Awesome Radicalness but some really neat shots, like the reflection in the climber's goggles... Reminds me a bit of the Sega Scream that used to end all their spots.
"Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained. I think of Buddha's smile and Einstein's halo of hair. I think of birthday parties. I think of common politeness, and the breathtaking attempt to imagine what someone else is feeling. I think of spirit lamps."
--John Updike
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