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The Illustrated History
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The Beginnings
My time as a corporate slave was about to end. Gia had received her undergraduate degree, and we were going walkabout to Europe. Our plane tickets were open-ended, and we had no plans to return.
Our initial stay would be in the small island country of Malta. Why Malta? Back then it was inexpensive.
We had booked a hostel on Malta for six weeks when the idea struck.
We planned to stay two weeks, but six weeks was about the same price.
Hibernia House Hostel where Walkabout Travel Gear was born.
Our view. I wrote about the pub across the street for Modern Drunkard Magazine.
All Maltese buses were green antiques.
Ħaġar Qim. Some of the oldest manmade structures on Earth. In 1995 you could still climb on them.
March 6, 1995. The idea emerges. We decided to return home to the United States and use our travel money to start the business.
March 6, 1995 journal entry.
We had backpacked previously and knew which products worked best. Our deluxe kitchen in Athens. We sold these stoves later.
Testing the first products.
The Walkabout Travel Smoke Detector. A best-selling product for twenty years.
HiLo Voltage Adapter Kit. We sold countless numbers of these over the years.
Our Walkabout Wash Kit for clothes. A very popular product.
StartUp
We had $5,000 and credit cards. We squatted in my sister's basement to save money.
Accounting programs were expensive then, and ones that could handle inventory were far more expensive. Paper was not.
The internet was new and unknown to us. Our plans were for a mail-order catalog.
Our catalog was crude but fun. Our first ad was in the Salt Lake Tribune travel section. Look close!
We got an 800 number and mailed out a bunch of catalogs to the local press, as well as family and friends. The phone rang. "I'd like to place an order," the voice said. It was my Uncle Ken. He didn't say "Hi, Brad" or anything—just placed an order.
With the help of friends Alan Bowes and Chris Davison, we put a website on that newfangled internet thing.
Max Knudson wrote a large article in the Deseret News. The phone never stopped ringing after that.
Boom! We vacated the basement and bought a house in Moab, Utah.
Moab, Utah
The house came with a beautiful view but no internet. In Moab in 1996, the internet had only just arrived, and the local provider was literally operating out of a guy’s basement.
We kept the website hosted in Salt Lake City because we were wary of the local infrastructure. The website continued to grow exponentially and won many internet awards. Brad did all the webpage programming.
Worried the Internet might just be a fad, we opened a store. Turns out it wasn’t.
Our first and last retail outlet at 88 East Center Street in Moab, Utah.
The cliché “location, location, location” is not a cliché.
Gia built a wonderful store and customers who visited loved it. But our location a block from Main Street could not be overcome.
Employees had plenty of free time.
Weary travelers could check their email.
Previously a toy store, we purchased the fixtures.
Eagle Creek, Lonely Planet, Cascade Designs...
We Lose Our Basement
Internet sales grew exponentially. The business quickly consumed our basement.
It was barely controlled chaos.
We bought boxes and shipping supplies in bulk.
All the adapters you could eat.
Before Wi-Fi, you had to physically hook your laptop to a phone jack. There were 39 varieties of phone jacks in the world. This was a real hassle for the international traveler, but a bonanza for us. Profit margins were high on the adapters, and we bundled them into sets for corporate customers.
Walkabout became a huge seller of travel adapters, and we quickly sourced suppliers in Asia to purchase directly from. Importing thirty years ago involved entirely physical paperwork. Our bank in Moab became accustomed to the process, but initially it was new to them.
Today’s electronics are almost universally dual-voltage and only require an adapter. Back then many items needed heavy and expensive transformers.
We were one of the first sellers of Pacsafe products. I met the owners at a trade show when they were just getting started, and we maintained a close relationship for over a decade. Many a trade show night was spent with the Pacsafe crew. They could almost drink as much as I could.
Tired of losing half our house, we rented the small house next door. I built a gate to connect the properties.
The house was jam-packed, but we had our basement back. Soon we realized we needed a fulfillment center to ship our products. It would be a lengthy and expensive search, but our sanity was slipping.
The Motor Homes
A new, hip internet business that emerged from bootstrapping and was located in Moab, Utah made an enticing article hook. But the story really went ballistic when reporters learned we were running part of the operation from a motor home.
Our first motor home was a 1989 37-foot Pace Arrow we named Bessie. The business was making money, and we needed deductions. Thanks to Section 179 of the tax code, an RV can be treated as business equipment and depreciated much faster than a typical vehicle if it is used primarily for business. We did not expect to be RV owners, but were for the next twenty years.
Running Walkabout Travel Gear required a 24-hour commitment. Answering phones, taking orders, shipping products, etc., made us prisoners in our own house. We had escaped the corporate rat race only to become free rats in a tiny cage. But what if you ran an online business from a mobile command center? You would have to take some inventory…
So we did. Every nook and cranny of Bessie’s interior was stuffed with our estimate of two weeks’ demand.
Adapters. Omnipresent adapters.
We took orders online and by phone, authorizing credit cards over a cellular phone (about 4K!) and shipping products while on the road. Walkabout Travel Gear was the first internet retail company to operate this way. Major publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Fortune covered us.
We calculated that two weeks was the maximum trip we could take based on inventory. Even then it was a bit of a gamble. The RV park would need to have phone jacks available, which turned out to be uncommon. Our first extended trip was to Las Vegas for COMDEX, a high-tech trade show. The only RV park we could find with phone jacks was at the now-demolished Castaways Casino, previously known as the Showboat.
We also traveled to San Diego, Salt Lake City, and other cities, but mobile trips with inventory became impossible without losing orders—especially large corporate ones worth $$$. Dell Computer began using us to supply less common grounded electrical adapters, and missing one of those orders for thousands of high-margin adapters could cost more than the entire trip.
Travelers had never worried about grounded adapters previously; hair dryers and most small appliances used two-pronged plugs. But traveling with a laptop meant grounded adapters were necessary. Luckily for us, there were many varieties. Dell Computer ordered the Italy grounded adapter and other uncommon adapters in lots of 1,000—at retail prices.
It became clear we needed a fulfillment center. It was difficult to find a fulfillment company willing to work with smaller businesses like us.
Big Business
In 2007, we finally found our fulfillment center: North Bay Shipping in Healdsburg, California. It meant we would be forced to spend a month a year in Napa Valley! Oh, the hardships of self-employment.
It would be expensive, but owner Jeannie Dardini was willing to work with us. Turning the shipping over to North Bay meant our growth would no longer be constrained. And it wasn’t.
We occupied several rows at North Bay Fulfillment. Each fall we visited for a month for inventory counts and a little wine tasting. Fitbit also used North Bay.
We went all in on our new product, the Walkabout Solution. Even a video! The product combined a converter with a multi-plug adapter, so one device was all the average traveler needed. It was massively successful.
We purchased a new RV with all the works. Two bathrooms! No more inventory in every nook and cranny. Of course we needed the RV to attend trade shows in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, San Diego, Vancouver, Canada… After enough trade shows in Vegas, Brad achieved a long-desired goal: mastering craps.
We bought a PT Cruiser to tow behind the RV—55 feet total length for the Walkabout Caravan. Gia did all the driving, leaving Brad to work on the website while on the road.
Running the business full-time from an RV became an actual urban legend, even making it into college textbooks.
Moab was being overrun with motorized tourism. We could choose to live where we wanted, and we chose Lincoln City, Oregon.
The Decline and Retirement
In 2012 Google converted its free Product Search listings into paid Google Shopping ads. Large retailers with big advertising budgets quickly took over the results. For smaller niche sellers like us, a major source of traffic disappeared almost overnight.
At the same time, Amazon Marketplace could see which products sold best through third-party sellers and often began sourcing those products directly or launching competing versions under its own brands—an approach that helped destroy many small businesses.
Maybe it was time to reopen a retail store. (No way we were doing that.) Instead, we rebuilt our online sales with different strategies, and Walkabout Travel Gear was on the rebound. Then the COVID pandemic hit. Travel and the need for travel products dropped to almost zero within weeks. After twenty-five years, we were tired.
We retired. Walkabout Travel Gear still exists online at
walkabouttravelgear.com
but only as an information source.
Our new project is Glampabout.com. It's fun! Take a look.
Visit site →
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