Case study · Outdoor e-commerce
Building an outdoor brand from $10,000.
My partner and I started Nomadica with $10,000 and a good feel for the gear we wanted to sell. Over eight years we built an international import and distribution business, and learned how to change course when the business we'd built needed to change.
The challenge
Starting small.
We were walking into a market of established distributors with big inventories and far more buying power than we had. What we had was knowledge: of the products, and of the people who actually use them.
The approach
Making growth affordable.
I became the US importer and distributor for an international outdoor brand, then added other lines over time. We sold through Shopify and a dealer network. A local fulfillment partner handled most shipments, and our own warehouse covered bulk orders, overflow, and direct customer service.
With so little starting capital, timing mattered as much as sales. I organized the business around turning inventory and collecting payment before supplier bills came due, which let us grow without buying stock we couldn't afford. In the early years revenue tripled year over year, and we shipped to customers across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
The hard call
Walking away from 90% of revenue.
Eventually our largest vendor, roughly 90% of our revenue, was no longer a good fit for how we wanted to run the business. We decided to walk away. Replacing that revenue with another stocked line would have taken more money and time than we could reasonably commit, so I leaned on the vendor relationships we'd built and moved to a dropship model.
The change cut our overhead and freed the money that had been tied up in inventory. That freed capital is what let us build HYNTR, our apparel line. Nomadica is still operating, and over eight years it has returned roughly 30 times our starting capital.