The Cabelas were game, and on the strength of handshake, the project began. The model was taken to the job site and served as a blueprint for construction. Some were small, but most were big game animals — sheep, goat, caribou, grizzly, moose, the whole thing. There were scrawny little ones and bad skins, but no good ones. I had hunted a Kodiak bear, my first one, probably ten years earlier.
It was one of my prized possessions. And, to be very candid, I was trying to make payroll. And when they started to see it, they became very excited. Retail Walmart. Retail Trail Appliance. Retail Preston Crossing Shopping Centre. About Us We remain true to the same principles on which our company was founded: providing superior service to our clients, putting safety first, and creating opportunities for our people.
Orders from the Casper, Wyoming advertisement were filled by Dick and his wife Mary, who worked in their home in Chappell, seated around the kitchen table. As orders for the flies increased, Dick Cabela purchased other outdoor recreational items and mailed a mimeographed list of other products available. For the Cabelas, direct-mail marketing worked quick wonders. The couple's inventory grew rapidly as more and more customers placed orders from the mimeographed lists.
By , the growth of their inventory required the establishment of a warehouse. Although the kitchen table still served as the business office, there was now another component to the couple's operations--a small backyard shed that served as their warehouse.
During the first several years of their business, the Cabelas fueled greater demand by continually expanding their mimeographed list of products until it developed into a mimeographed catalogue of merchandise. As the business expanded, its growth created the need for the trappings of a conventional business, but the evolution of the business away from its kitchen-table roots occurred in measured steps.
By the fall of , the Cabelas realized their homebound business required greater support, both in terms of personnel and proper facilities. Initially, they had relied on temporary typists to help with catalogue preparation, mailing, and labeling; but not long after devoting their backyard shed to warehouse space, Dick and Mary Cabela knew their business required full-time attention and full-time employees.
Dick Cabela convinced his younger brother Jim to join the enterprise in , but neither Jim, Mary, nor Dick received any compensation during the first several years.
All the profits were directed toward increasing mailing activities, purchasing a greater selection of merchandise, and paying for bigger facilities. In , after three years of using a kitchen table as their primary office space, the Cabela brothers moved the company's operations into the basement of their father's furniture store in Chappell. By the following year, the business had grown large enough to warrant incorporation and another move to larger facilities. The business was moved across the street into a former U.
Department of Agriculture building, and then two years later into the American Legion Hall in Chappell. At the Chappell Legion Hall, which housed the company's warehousing operations and its offices, a small retail display was showcased in the corner of one floor. Although a negligible contributor to the company's financial stature, the retail product display in the American Legion Hall was a precursor to Cabela's grandiose foray into the retail side of the business more than 20 years later.
One year after moving into the Chappell Legion Hall, the Cabela brothers packed up the business and moved again, venturing out of Chappell for the first time. A search for larger quarters had revealed a vacant John Deere building near downtown Sidney, Nebraska.
The building, which comprised four stories and 50, square feet of space, had been donated to a local hospital as a tax write-off, but the hospital wanted to sell the building before it incurred property taxes.
Because of the hospital's predicament, the Cabelas were able to acquire the building at a sharply reduced price, purchasing it in September The business was moved to the old John Deere building in , and for the first time in its history, the Cabela enterprise occupied a facility that was larger than the company's needs.
At first, only one floor--the first floor--of the building was used. Upstairs, above the warehousing, packing, shipping, and retail operations located on the first floor, Cabela employees used a portion of one floor as an archery range, but eventually the needs of the company required the space occupied by the archery range. Gradually, as the s progressed, Cabela's moved up into the empty floors, ultimately occupying the entire building. By the mids, more than a decade of steady growth had stretched the company to the physical limits of the building in Sidney, forcing the Cabela brothers to search again for facilities that could accommodate their business's growing needs.
The need for more space sprang from the company's ever-growing mail-order operations. As it had from the start, Cabela's produced its catalog on its own, a rarity among direct-mail businesses. The company's employees performed all the work involved in producing the catalog, including the copywriting, typesetting, photography, and merchandising.
Aside from the in-house catalog operations, the company also performed all its own warehousing, packing, and shipping duties, as well as staffing its own telemarketing operations, all of which required additional space. In , the Cabela brothers fulfilled their need by acquiring a former Rockwell International plant in Kearney, Nebraska. Into this building, the Cabelas moved their telemarketing operations, which became a source of employment for the community's college students.
With a steady supply of college students to operate the telephone lines, Cabela's ran its telemarketing operations 24 hours a day. The Kearney facility also became the home of Cabela's second retail store, a facet of the ompany's business that attracted nearly all of the attention directed at Cabela's during the s.
During the s, Cabela's opened several new retail stores that managed to transcend the allure of even the most popular retail businesses to become something far more captivating. Cabela's retail stores, all situated in the Midwest, became tourist destinations, attracting weekend crowds that exceeded the population of the communities in which they were located. The stores were massive, intricately and abundantly outfitted with displays that reflected the company's outdoor sporting merchandise.
Not surprisingly, when these stores opened to voluminous crowds, the business press focused their attention on the sprawling retail outlets, but at the heart of Cabela's was its mail-order business. Catalog sales propelled the company forward, not the revenue generated by its retail stores.
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