Bass Pro Shops, A Sporting Goods Empire from a Tackle Display

In nineteen seventy-two, a twenty-four-year-old named Johnny Morris set up a small fishing tackle display in a corner of his father's liquor and sporting goods store on South Campbell Avenue in Springfield, Missouri. He called it Bass Pro Shops. The display occupied only about eight square feet.

He ran mail-order ads in outdoor magazines. Within a decade, Bass Pro Shops had become one of the largest mail-order sporting goods operations in the country. Morris understood something that the big outdoor retailers had missed: serious anglers and hunters did not want a generic sporting goods store.

They wanted a place designed for people who took the outdoors seriously, staffed by people who actually fished and hunted, stocked with products that actually worked in the field. In nineteen eighty-one, Morris converted a warehouse adjacent to the original store into what he called the Outdoor World, a flagship retail experience unlike anything that had existed in American retail. Mounted fish.

Waterfalls. A four-story waterfall inside the store. An aquarium stocked with native Ozark species.

Taxidermied wildlife in natural settings. It was not a store exactly. It was closer to a museum that also sold things, and people drove from hundreds of miles away to visit it.

The Springfield Outdoor World is still the company's flagship. The campus now covers hundreds of thousands of square feet and draws millions of visitors annually, making it one of the most-visited tourist destinations in Missouri. What Morris built from an eight-foot tackle display is now one of the most recognized outdoor retail brands in the world.

That is not a common trajectory. It is a distinctly Ozarkian one.