I love the opportunity to get outdoors and I've found as I've gotten older with a young family
there's been a period of time that's been harder to get outdoors. As the business is maturing and
the children are getting older I'm finding it a lot easier to get
back to getting outdoors again. I'm really enjoying taking my children and having them
start to experience the mountains like I remember. Teaching them how to ski taking them on bush walks
and trying to teach them how to fly fish at that age. I'm finding it really enjoyable.
When I get a chance to get outdoors by myself then I really appreciate and notice a lot more than I
used to when I was younger. So you know when I was in my 20s it was about going somewhere and getting
to that place and either getting to the top of that hill or that mountain or having that hardcore
experience whereas now I find I'm not chasing that experience anymore, I just want to be out there.
So in my early 20s, I did the typical Aussie thing and went backpacking and spent a couple
of months travelling around Europe and then I ended up in northern England in an area called
the lake district. I ended up with a job in an outdoor store, that was my first experience with
outdoor retail. I really got to experience a whole bunch of different stuff all from my doorstep. The
first six months I didn't have a car so I hiked everywhere, I did over a hundred of the local
mountaintops, the Wainwrights, a whole heap of walking, a lot of photography. Just a great place
to spend time. "Chris what's happened here have we forgotten matches or something."
You learn to rely on your gear in a location like that,
the average rainfall is something around three meters so you spend a lot of time walking and
camping and doing outdoor activities just in the rain. So you really learn to trust your equipment
and you really learn that there is no such thing as bad weather it's just bad gear. So I met Chris
in 2008, he was living and working in the lake district and I was obviously living there. I
actually went into a store to buy a backpack, Chris was working in one of the outdoor stores,
I was coming around travelling around Australia and he was actually coming back to Australia
after his time in the UK and I was here with some friends and yeah and that's the end of the
story really. It just went from there once we got married we decided to move back to Australia and
we decided that Tumut was a good place to move back to. We were in this limbo-land we didn't
really know what to do for our next chapter and Chris came up with the idea of starting an outdoor
store and I was like yep that's great. I was pregnant with our second daughter at the time.
We spent from July to October setting up the store and then we opened the doors in October and yeah
we went from there. I suppose the catalyst for starting toms was that we'd spent so much time
in Europe and the UK and they had all these amazing outdoor stores with a whole bunch
of really high-quality gear. So what I really wanted to do was put a high-quality outdoor store
back out in a regional place where we can really live and breathe what we do. We don't open until
nine o'clock and we close at five so for us or any of the staff that are here if you want to go for a
fish in the morning or a mountain bike ride before work you're able to do that. You're not commuting
through the city on your pushbike or spending an hour in traffic trying to get to where you are.
We started out fairly small there was just me and we had Kane in really early in the piece. We had
a good range of core brands we had some brands that really believed in what we were going to do.
We are a physical retail store so we're not just an online store. We've not stuck out in some
western suburbs warehouse area or an industrial estate in Melbourne something like that.
We're a real store. We're deeply connected with the place that we're in you know so we can get out
and we can kayak and we can fish and we can ski we can do some of those activities on a daily basis.
So we're different to all the other stores in Australia because of because we're here in Tumut.
So Tom's Outdoors is a deeply personal name to us. We named the business after
our grandfathers. So I have a grandfather called Tom and my wife has a grandfather called Tom.
Both of them are still alive and they were of that first generation that really
treated the outdoors as a recreational pursuit, you know in the early 50s and 60s. That love
of outdoor recreation then flowed down through our parents and then it flowed down through us.
A lot of people think we're a chain store, in reality, Tom's Outdoors here in Tumut we are the
only one in the world. There is not another outdoor store called Tom's Outdoors so it's
pretty cool to have a name that's so unique but also a name that means so much to us personally.
So in the beginning we had this idea of what we wanted. We got a few of the brands that we wanted
and we opened the doors. We knew we wanted to have a high-quality store but not really knowing
the direction that we were going in and that's kind of developed over the five years that we've
been here and I suppose we've become more of an I don't know if you call it a destination store
um but a store that people want to come and visit.
One of the things that I really enjoy about being a retail store is that we do get to meet so many
interesting people that have a shared passion. It is so enjoyable to talk to those people about
what they're planning on doing. If they come into a place like this they're coming in
because they've got a passion about the place and the gear. I really like when somebody places an
order online through our website that we've got all the stuff here and we're sending it all from
here. You know the items are coming from the shop and they're getting packed by hand we're putting
in a thank you card to say that they've come from the Snowy Mountains and then we're giving
them to the local post office. It's really a sense of community that when somebody's buying
from us online here there's a couple of people that are supported in local jobs here in town
and I get a real sense of satisfaction out of knowing that it's not just what we're doing here
in the business it's actually what we're doing in some levels for the town and that's pretty cool.
Yeah, our passion and Chris's passion for the outdoors is what really drives us to give good
customer service and to have Tom's Outdoors really because we really love being out in the outdoors.
Chris loves being out there and he's always got some crazy adventure that he wants to go on.
The store really embodies what I'm passionate about so we cover fly fishing we cover a bit
of climbing we cover a bit of hiking and overnight. I only want to stock products
and brands and activities that we're connected with or that our staff are still connected with.
I think the shop should be a catalyst for outdoor activity in the region
and even if we're making videos that inspire people to spend time in the area they don't
have to shop with us like it doesn't worry me. At the end of the day if they're coming to the
area and visiting the area and engaging in what is just an amazing part of Australia
that's awesome to me that's what embodies everything that we've done.
Opening the store has been a really rewarding journey. It's had some massive
highs and massive lows. It hasn't been an easy process. It hasn't been easy personally.
It's been hard on family, it's been stressful at times but it's been really rewarding
and really the part that's made it really rewarding is being the people that I've met.
The people that come through the store helping them find those local experiences and helping
them find the gear that's going to enable them to do that, I get a lot of pleasure out of that.
It's just yeah it's a really nice feeling to know that your job isn't just a job anymore like I was
thinking that the other day coming to work isn't a chore. I love coming in and you never know who's
going to walk through those doors and I mean there are times where it's hard and there's a lot of
work but yeah but the rewards and the friendships that we've made probably outweigh all of that.