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Gary Rose got here into work the opposite day. This was uncommon, contemplating he’s been retired from REI for practically 30 years. He walked in with the sluggish however assured gait of a person who, although practically 90 now, has been lively his entire life. On a desk lay items of drugs, every bearing a tag with Rose’s identify and the yr they’d been purchased as gadgets for the co-op to promote:
A plastic canteen.
Children’s bentwood snowshoes.
Ancient ice screws.
An altimeter.
Rose was a significant purchaser for REI for many years, procuring gadgets from everywhere in the world. “Are any of these things that you sourced?” requested Will Dunn, REI historian and influence communications program supervisor, who had positioned them out for Rose to see.
“Oh yeah,” Rose replied.
He picked them up in flip: Pitons. A Primus range. Carabiners. Avalanche transceivers from the Seventies and ‘80s. The slide rule that Rose used before computers. His face took on the look one gives an old friend seen at a high school reunion after too many years—first recognition, then delight, as memories came back. He hadn’t laid eyes on the gadgets in a minimum of 1 / 4 century.
Rose, who labored for REI from 1960 to 1996, is a residing hyperlink to REI historical past, a key member of that second era of leaders who discovered on the toes of founders Lloyd and Mary Anderson after which carried ahead the concepts and beliefs of the co-op. Rose began as one of many co-op’s earliest staff earlier than changing into a key purchaser. As curiosity in out of doors recreation boomed beginning within the early Seventies, his decisions actually stocked the cabinets and made REI an indispensable cease.
“If anyone ever deserved the designation of REI icon, it’s Gary Rose,” Mike Boshart, who labored for REI for a number of years and served briefly as Rose’s assistant within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, wrote in an e-mail.
Rose was visiting the co-op’s new Creative Hub in Seattle’s SoDo district at Dunn’s invitation. Here, designers, prototypers, engineers and product testers collaborate on the way forward for REI Co-op merchandise.
As he entered, Rose walked previous a room stuffed with racks of colourful clothes—shirts and jackets for spring 2025—and one other stuffed with mountain bike frames. Rose appeared round him, amazed. In the center of the Creative Hub sits the Living Archive, overseen by Dunn—an association that clearly indicators the will that REI’s previous continues to tell and enrich its future.
From the desk, Rose lifted an ice axe with an aged ash shaft and a metal adze. He turned it with the appraising palms of a former mountain information, blissful to see his identify stamped within the metallic. (He’s climbed Mount Rainier 45 instances, from seven routes.)
“Grivel.” He mentioned the model while not having to look. “A good quality one. But heavy. We’ve shortened ‘em up, too.”
Born and raised in Edmonds, Washington, he’d fallen onerous for the mountains at age 15 whereas taking a climbing class from The Mountaineers, whose clubhouse was subsequent door to a younger REI. After graduating from the University of Washington, Rose turned a summit information on Mount Rainier. On his days off he returned to the Seattle space to run errands and wash garments. He’d additionally typically swing by REI to exchange a chunk of drugs, and obtained to know Jim Whittaker, then the gross sales supervisor. Whittaker labored beneath co-founder Lloyd Anderson. (Whittaker, in fact, went on to be the co-op’s second president and CEO.)
“I happened to be in there one time in the fall and I said, ‘Are you gonna have any openings for job opportunities?’ And [Jim] said, ‘Well, one of our salesmen is going back to school, so we’ll have an opening. If you’re interested, come on in.’”
“That was the first of October, 1960. And I spent the next 36 years there.”
What job did he do at first?
“Sweep the floor,” Rose replied and chuckled.
“You were just kind of a jack-of-all trades,” he mentioned. “Sometimes I’d work on the cash register. Sometimes I’d help the customers; stock shelves.”
REI stocked largely onerous items for climbing mountains on the time, together with dehydrated meals and Sno-Seal for waterproofing. Back then, climbing ropes got here in big spools of Manila rope. The salespeople spent plenty of their time reducing coils of rope for members or making crevasse slings. Rose remembered their shortcut: If a buyer wished 150 toes of rope, they’d run the rope from the spool right down to the top of the corridor, to the maps, to the map of Chiwaukum Peak, after which double it again.
The retailer was positioned above the Green Apple Pie Café at sixth Avenue and Pike Street downtown and there was no freight elevator, Rose recalled. So “everything had to go up the stairs.” The co-op wholesaled Vibram® boot soles from Italy to cobblers round city. The heavy rubber soles arrived in huge picket crates that needed to be wrestled up the stairway. He laughed on the reminiscence. “They were a gut-buster all right.”
Most of the time, although, “I loved working there,” Rose mentioned. “You really got acquainted with the members. The same people came back in, back in, back in,” he mentioned. “I made a lot of friends. … It was a close community of climbers.”
Rose’s profession as a purchaser occurred practically accidentally not lengthy after he began.
“Lloyd did most of the buying,” he mentioned. “I went to him one time and I kind of shot my mouth off.” In his view, Lloyd all the time appeared to purchase an excessive amount of 16mm movie. The leftovers would expire, Rose instructed him, they usually’d should throw it away. “I feel it in all probability made Lloyd just a little mad, sort of questioning him.
Because he mentioned one thing like, ‘I don’t know something about movie. Why don’t you purchase it any longer?’”
So Rose began shopping for the movie. Pretty quickly he was shopping for much more issues, after which he was spending all his time shopping for as an alternative of serving to prospects on the ground. His tasks grew to buying “whatever Lloyd didn’t buy.”
Rose doesn’t brag about his profession; he credited his promotion to not his acumen however to the shop’s booming enterprise on the time. But there’s little doubt he turned good at it. What neither man knew, then, was that moments like this have been indicators of the subsequent era of leaders beginning to take the reins.
And between them, REI was sniffing out and importing transformative gear such because the Svea 123 tenting range, the primary compact range to make use of white gasoline. (The all-gold Svea roared like a jet engine within the woods; the late author Harvey Manning known as it “the Swedish hand grenade.
Rose was “protector of the soul of the company during years of dramatic change,” Boshart says. “A good reality check on what was actually practical to execute, Gary could be an understated but highly perceptive critic of new initiatives, especially if we started to get ahead of ourselves.”
In 1964, Rose traveled to Europe with Lloyd and Mary to hunt out merchandise. It was the primary of many such journeys. Rose remembered one specifically with Lloyd: The two rented a VW Beetle and drove from southern Italy to almost the Arctic Circle in Sweden, visiting range firms, shoemakers and tent producers, and climbing alongside the best way. One day they climbed Switzerland’s Jungfrau, descending too late to catch the final practice down the mountain. They needed to spend the evening within the cog railway’s higher station.
By the early Seventies the out of doors trade was quickly altering. The provides of Army surplus gear that for many years crammed cabinets of the early co-op—the 5-cent tubes of sunscreen, the wool pants—have been drying up. Meanwhile, the ‘60s, with their environmental awakening, were sending a new generation of Americans into the woods and mountains. REI almost couldn’t deal with the quantity of recent prospects, Rose recalled. Luckily, this meant a wave of recent product innovation. That made the position of a savvy purchaser extra essential than ever.
But was the stuff ok for patrons, who relied on it?
At the Creative Hub, Rose walked by means of a door. An indication overhead learn, “We Test the Gear.” This is the Magnusson Test Lab, the place since 1971 the co-op has put gadgets—from sleeping baggage to tent poles—by means of their paces to ensure they’d final.
Jim Hollenbeck, the Magnusson Lab Shop lead, confirmed Rose the computer-controlled scorching plates, the tear-strength machines, the environmental chamber that may go from -85°F to 185°F.
Rose appeared round.
“What an improvement,” he mentioned. His voice held the wistfulness of the previous purchaser who wished he’d had such assist in his day.
How did he and REI decide high quality again within the Nineteen Sixties? somebody requested.
“We’d bend it—and break it if we could!” Rose replied, and he laughed.
“It’s kind of what we still do,” Hollenbeck replied.
Rose labored with Cal Magnusson, a legend inside the co-op who ran product testing and whose identify the lab now bears. Magnusson was good and frugal and identified generally to plot testing machines out of junkyard supplies.
“I remember Cal made an abrasion tester for webbing and ropes,” mentioned Rose. “He went to a junkyard and got an old crank case.”
“A Peugeot engine block,” confirmed Hollenbeck.
“I was down in the lab one day,” mentioned Rose, “and I said, ‘Cal, if you’d only gotten a V-8 engine, you could have worked twice as fast!”
Gear high quality did enhance, Rose recalled. But, he mentioned, “It didn’t happen overnight.”
By the mid-Seventies Rose was accountable for bringing in a wide range of merchandise: batteries, devices, packs and rucksacks, gear for water sports activities, tentpoles, pegs, stoves, snowshoes. “The biggest purchase order that I ever wrote was for over a million dollars’ worth of down” so {that a} provider, Washington Quilt Company, may make sleeping baggage for the REI label, he mentioned. “They used to laugh at me and call me the Feather Merchant.”
There was a thrill to the hunt for the subsequent helpful merchandise. What sort of devices may they purchase to make the out of doors expertise higher for individuals? “If we didn’t have it, and you found it and ended up putting it on the shelf, you got satisfaction out of it.”
Consider the avalanche shovel: One that Rose had seen in Sweden didn’t impress him a lot; it was clunky and heavy. So he labored with a provider in Bellevue, Washington, to create a folding shovel for REI. The completed product match neatly on the aspect of a pack and the blade may tilt. “Boy, you could really move a lot of snow with it, if you were digging a cave, or digging a buried victim out of an avalanche,” he mentioned. “They were quite popular.”
Not each concept labored out. “We had losers, that’s for sure,” he mentioned (that chuckle, once more).
For a time, REI offered insect repellent manufactured from 100% DEET—about thrice what’s thought of obligatory to discourage biting bugs and what most different manufacturers include. “It was really powerful stuff,” Rose mentioned. “The mosquitoes, they wouldn’t even land.
“I remember we got a complaint one time. Some guy comes in; he’d bought a bottle of that and he’d left it on the dashboard of his car, and it ate the plastic off. I think it was an insurance claim. They had to buy him a new dashboard.”
Rose retired from REI in 1996. By that point, he was the tenting purchaser. “It was all the penny-nickel-dime items—whistles, you name it. Lapel pins,” he mentioned in his typical understated method. Pressed, he acknowledged that “it was actually one of the biggest departments, for dollar sales, because they had so many different items.”
Says Boshart of his former mentor, “Gary knew nearly every little thing in key areas, and was glad to overtly share with out making you’re feeling silly for asking…. When we moved to doing regional retailer excursions and product clinics, staff held on Gary’s each phrase.
“People still say with pride: ‘I worked with Rose.’”
By the time he retired, one of many largest adjustments Rose seen was how trendiness had entered the world of out of doors gear. “It seemed like what was hot last year, doesn’t sell this year. It was always jumping to something new.”
At the Creative Hub, it was time to go. Dunn instructed Rose he’d like to see that avalanche shovel someday—he’d by no means heard of it—and maybe take an image of it for the Living Archive. And he invited Rose again anytime.
Rose picked up the ice axe another time and smiled for the digicam. Then he headed out into the afternoon sunshine.