RIDE THE TSUNAMI VENTUES

The Outdoor Operator Project

At Ride the Tsunami Venture, we’ve always believed that the best businesses are built by solving real problems—not imagined ones.

Over the past several months, we’ve spent time exploring opportunities across the outdoor industry, speaking with founders, operators, and business owners to better understand the unique challenges they face. One theme has emerged consistently: outdoor brands operate in an environment unlike almost any other industry.

Outdoor companies are expected to build predictable businesses around one of the most unpredictable forces imaginable—nature.

Weather patterns shift. Seasons arrive early or late. Wildfire, drought, snowfall, tourism, and changing consumer behavior all influence demand in ways that are difficult to forecast. At the same time, brands must make inventory decisions months in advance, commit capital to manufacturing, and coordinate increasingly complex supply chains.

This creates a fascinating operational paradox.

As companies grow, the systems that helped them succeed in their early years—experience, intuition, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge—often struggle to keep pace with the complexity of scaling the business.

To better understand this challenge, we’re launching The Outdoor Operator Project.

What is The Outdoor Operator Project?

The Outdoor Operator Project is an independent research initiative focused on uncovering the operational realities of founder-led outdoor brands.

Over the coming months, we’ll be interviewing founders, COOs, operations leaders, supply chain professionals, and ecommerce teams across the outdoor industry. Our goal isn’t to sell software or consulting services. It’s to listen, learn, identify recurring patterns, and develop a deeper understanding of the operational challenges that define modern outdoor businesses.

We’re particularly interested in questions such as:

• How do outdoor brands forecast demand when weather is inherently unpredictable?
• What operational decisions create the greatest financial risk?
• Where do data, systems, and people break down as companies scale?
• Which challenges are shared across the industry, and which are unique to specific categories?

Why We’re Doing This

We believe meaningful companies are built from evidence, not assumptions.

Rather than beginning with a solution and searching for a problem, we’re taking the opposite approach: spending time with the people closest to the work, documenting what we learn, and allowing those insights to shape what comes next.

Whether that ultimately leads to operational advisory services, benchmarking research, software, or entirely new ventures will be determined by what the research uncovers.

Looking Ahead

As the project progresses, we’ll share aggregated insights, emerging trends, and practical observations from the conversations we’re having across the industry. Our hope is that these findings become a valuable resource not only for outdoor founders and operators, but for anyone interested in building more resilient businesses.

If you’re a founder or operations leader at an outdoor brand and would like to participate in the project, we’d love to hear from you.

The best ideas often begin with a conversation. We believe the next generation of outdoor innovation will begin by listening.