In the Outdoor Industry, You Don't Have to Know What You Are Doing.... But You Have to Know Everything Else

By: Lisa Slagle, Founder & Creative Director

Across the nation, chairlifts are ceasing to spin for the winter and mountain bike tires are being inflated. In fact, if you sit outside and listen hard enough, you can actually hear the lifts creaking to a stop and air pushing into tubeless sidewalls. Seasons are changing. Stoke is getting reallocated from snow to dirt.


At my business, Wheelie Creative, we love seasons. We embrace them on a personal level. (Dan and Amanda are spending the day riding their road bikes up and down Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, and I’m about to take my puppy to the lake.) At my creative agency, we also embrace seasons from the perspective of fresh content creation for the brands we work with, and this is very exciting. (Content marketing is where it’s at. It allows brands to show their stories instead of telling them, and it works.)


The longer I’m in business and extremely active in the outdoor industry, the more I understand that the only constant is change, and you can either fight it, or you can adapt to it. Call me a Millennial. But one of my main strengths as a creative director and business owner is that I adapt quickly and gracefully, and this is important for brands in the outdoor industry.


I explain my belief in adaptability our clients a lot. Sometimes marketing managers or business owners admit that they feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. Just when they got the hang of Facebook, Instagram exploded in popularity, and now everyone is stoked on Snap Chat. 
In situations like this, I smile and tell our clients something they are surprised to hear:
In the outdoor industry, you don’t have to know what you are doing… but you have to know everything else.

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