Rent a tent: Camping gear marketplace startup aims to crack the code for outdoor equipment rental

June 12, 2023

GeerGarage, founded by a Microsoft product manager, is building an outdoor equipment-sharing marketplace, reports GeekWire.

The Seattle startup is gearing up to scale beyond its Western Washington roots, with plans to roll out its lend-to-own program and raise venture capital.

CEO Adam Wise dedicates much of his free time to backpacking, camping and biking around the Pacific Northwest and California. But like other outdoor enthusiasts, he has come to realize that his stockpile of tents and other recreational equipment spends most days collecting dust in storage.

This revelation inspired him to found GeerGarage. The platform matches renters with lenders who have gear like tents, bikes, and stand-up paddleboards.

The bootstrapped startup is gearing up to scale beyond Western Washington. The company is in the process of pitching investors and accelerators. It’s also rolling out a new lend-to-own program, through which approved lenders can get free outdoor gear.

GeerGarage is among a bevy of companies embracing the so-called “circular economy,” or the business model of sharing or leasing products rather than selling new ones. It’s part of the company’s broader mission to make outdoor activities cheaper and more accessible, Wise tells GeekWire.

The growth plans come as the camping and outdoor recreation market is climbing. Revenue volume is expected to reach more than $120 billion by 2027, according to market research.

GeerGarage works by connecting renters with nearby lenders through the platform. The company is unlike Airbnb because it does the matching for users, similar to Uber. If a user is planning a weekend camping trip for two people, for instance, the startup might connect the renter with a lender offering a suitable tent for those specific dates.

Wise said the startup’s matching tool is built on the insight that people do not care about the brand, color, or make of the gear they rent. He said the company’s main focus instead is helping renters find the gear needed to have the outdoor experience they want. The idea is for the platform to be as flexible as possible.

The company makes its money by taking 60% of each transaction. Users might make a “couple hundred dollars” per month renting gear on the platform, Wise says.

The startup will face competition from major retailers such as REI and Walmart, both of which offer recreational equipment rentals. There’s also startups like Quiptu—pitched as an “Airbnb for outdoor gear”—which raised pre-seed funding and is rolling out in Miami.

Arrive Outdoors, an online camping gear rental site, raised $4.75 million in 2020. And Seattle-based GearHouse gives users unlimited access to outdoor equipment rentals for a $105 monthly subscription.

For the immediate future, Wise says, “We’ve been spending a lot of our time focusing on getting the recipe right, from both the product perspective and the go-to-market as well. Once we’ve got that recipe, the plan is to roll this out and scale up—ideally in every city throughout the United States.”

Research contact: @geekwire

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany