Grivet Outdoors is nothing short of an anomaly. Founded by Coleman Whitsitt as a side project run from his home in 2015, the company has experienced growth of an unprecedented variety.
In just seven years, Grivet Outdoors has gone from $100,000 in sales annually to $65 million in 2022. For any company, 200% growth year after year is undeniably extraordinary, so it should come as no surprise that the man behind Grivet Outdoors is also extraordinary.
While his fellow high school classmates studied math and science, Coleman Whitsitt studied poker. In the early days of online poker, Whitsitt was determined to ‘win’ the hand, but also focused on developing his strategy.
Playing online poker was lucrative, but ever the entrepreneur, Whitsitt had his eye on a new side hustle: dropshipping. So he took some money he’d earned in poker tournaments and slowly began investing it in a brand-new venture.
Over time, Whitsitt began seeing the flaws in his early business model and started developing strategies to overcome them, essentially cutting out the middleman altogether.
Whitsitt’s original software gave him a critical competitive advantage; he used it to find the product categories on eBay with the greatest demand, enabling him to cater to customers’ needs.
Grivet Outdoors is now one of the largest online sellers of some of the hottest outdoor apparel in the country. Brands on Grivet’s roster include The North Face, Hoka One One, Brooks, Patagonia, On Cloud, and so on.
While ingenuity and persistence were some of the building blocks for Grivet’s growth, Whitsitt attributes the brand’s staying power to qualities he holds in the utmost regard: relationships, trust, and performance.