How Dick Cabela Sold the Great Outdoors

The origin tale of Dick Cabela, who founded the outdoor-goods chain Cabela’s, and who died this week, at the age of seventy-seven, begins with fishing flies. In 1961, according to company lore, Cabela bought forty-five dollars’ worth of hand-tied lures to sell at his family’s furniture store, in Nebraska. Customers weren’t interested, so Cabela bought an ad in the magazine Sports Afield, offering five flies in exchange for twenty-five cents in postage. When people wrote in to redeem the offer, he put their names on a mailing list, which he blasted with three-page-long catalogues of fishing gear.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com