Who owns sports basement

Our stores change around every week. People prefer to gather in low-pressure places, where they can share experiences of life and love and activities and politics. I think of our stores as 40,square-foot coffee shops that just don't happen to sell any coffee. Sports Basement saves money by not bothering with slick or tidy signage and decor.

More comes from spurning traditional marketing and advertising. Those funds instead are directed at community outreach, like outings for inner city kids. Prosnitz said he'd rather produce a modest number of deep "hits" in communication with customers, than a vast number of shallow hits. Besides rapidly opening an array of huge stores, Sports Basement funds also flow into an uncommon array of employee benefits.

An employee stock option plan was tried once, and is about to be re-started. In keeping with the firm's egalitarian style, Prosnitz, the president, says his pay is only about six times the entry salary -- whereas, across the U. Such benefits, the collegial management style and the emphasis on peer-to-peer customer service draw employees like Zsolt Szadovszki, 32, a former Hungarian national team paddler who's now a Bay Area surf ski star and kayak-racing coach and instructor.

In , he began to work the Presidio floor as a triathlon and backcountry expert. Our personnel guy, Peter Madril, is good. But if they're going to keep it up, I think they have to clone him. I see some loose spots now, compared to when I started. We can't take that for granted. We don't want to grow, if that has to be at the expense of everything we've worked hard for. As these stores differ in size, products available at each unit vary accordingly, with broader selections at larger facilities.

Product mix is similar, only slight differences can be discerned. Presidio: Old Mason St. Has biggest bike shop, with emphasis on road biking, and kites, hats, snacks for Crissy Field visitors.

Sunnyvale: Kern Ave. At 50, sq. San Francisco: 16th St. Our first store ran on Windows 95 and our signs were all drawn by hand actually, we still draw a lot of our signs by hand - I guess not everything has to change! The dot-com boom was starting to bust, and Tom, Eric and Dave, friends since 1st grade, just wanted to get outdoors without paying an arm and a leg.

They banded together to create something weird and new - a sporting goods store that catered to everyone that wanted to enjoy the outdoors, with no high-cost barrier to entry.

The whole idea was to work with the smallest margins possible so Sports Basement could have the best brands at, well, Basement prices. It worked, and now Sports Basement is able to deliver great gear at great prices at 10 different stores in the greatest place on Earth that's the Bay Area, in case you weren't sure. We're so thankful that you, dear reader, are a part of our community!

We opened the Mission Bay store. It was our first official location and we were only open Friday-Sunday, and we cut costs everywhere we could - we made all our fixtures from found materials, painted our own signs, and Tom scoured the streets in his pickup looking for secondhand couches to clean up and use.

We've kept up that tradition - we still make all our fixtures from scratch, and you'll still find comfy couches in all our stores! Since we were at the store working every day, we decided to open 7 days a week - pretty wild, right?

Our staff took part in what would become a yearly tradition - attending and hosting a booth at the Wildflower Triathlon! We call it Camp Wildflower, 'cause it's basically summer camp for Sports Basement staffers.

And we didn't just ride with them - we went all in and sent our mechanics along to provide their valuable services along the ride - and we've kept on wrenchin' for ALC every year since. We outgrew our Mission Bay store and had a stroke of luck when the old commissary store that's military for "grocery store" became available in the Presidio. We threw out a bid for it right under the wire, and to our surprise, we got it!

We kept a lot of the signs up - that's why you can still see the Bakery and Fish sections at our Presidio store. The Presidio remains our oldest operational store, and is the home base for our President that's Eric up there as well as Tom! The South Bay kept catching our eye, so three years later we extended ourselves down Hwy and opened up our Sunnyvale store in what had been a Fry's Electronics. If you look carefully, you can still find some weird little touches from those days, like the bits of floor painted to look like a circuit board.

We stepped it up a notch when we decided to journey across the Bay Bridge to the East Bay just a year later! Our Walnut Creek store is small but mighty, and is literally filled to the rafters with good gear and good people. It took a ton of work manufacturing plants have very little in common with retail stores , but we managed to open that very same year. After years of staring longingly at the Pruneyard Shopping Center in Campbell, we finally got a chance to put down roots there.

Fun fact - part of that store's footprint used to be a video store videos are these black plastic boxes that we used to watch movies on before Netflix. We still show plenty of movies, so the legacy lives on! We're exceptionally proud of our second East Bay location - Berkeley's Iceland!

The once-glorious Iceland ice rink had been in a sad state of disrepair for years and years before we managed to convince the city that we'd be able to repair it while keeping its heritage intact. Signage describing the original ice rink are posted throughout the store, and we refurbished the scoreboard and kept the original Iceland sign, which is mounted behind our front registers.

The rest of the store is unchanged from its ice rink days minus the ice and yes, it can get kinda cold in there! If you have a very keen eye, you might be able to find some ice skates and other accessories that we recovered and built into our fixtures at the store! After a bit of a bumpy start, our newly formed ecommerce department launches our new and improved sportsbasement. We think it's pretty cool, and we're not just saying that 'cause you're browsing it right now.

Our Basementeer program, one of our proudest achievements, was launched in ! Since our founding we'd always worked hard to incorporate community partners like schools and local charities into our business model, with the thought that the more you shop, the more we're able to give. We're also a great resource for the community to start exploring the outdoors — we help them start camping, or skiing, or doing anything active.

We have events , classes, group rides, and community runs. This includes a group bike ride on Sundays that's great for both newbies and experienced cyclers. We have free community classes, like our yoga classes. And on Tuesday nights we have a popular fun run. There seems to be a leveling once you enter the store. This is a place that makes everyone feel comfortable with their ability — we cheer our customers on and encourage them to get outside and enjoy being active.

They can also come in and use the bathroom, buy a water bottle or get a snack — granola or protein bars or smoothie drinks — that can help tide them over for a couple hours in the park. We've got everything to help set people out on their adventure.

It's easy to be inspired every day. You come in and maybe someone is buying shoes and talking about where they're planning to run in the Presidio. I love that we can cheer at events by simply stepping out our front door! It's also fun to see familiar faces — both customers and staff — participating in events in the park. I hope that we've helped people understand that the park is available for everyone — we've shown people how to use it and how to launch from here to enjoy other activities.

And I hope we've helped them love being active. This is the time for New Year's resolutions. Do you have any suggestions for fun, healthy things to do in the Presidio to start your year off right?