INSPIRED BY TRAVEL

"INSPIRED BY TRAVEL" — A personal account of the entrepreneurial journey by Ricky Schlesinger, co-founder of Eagle Creek.

Ricky Schlesinger in the 1980s
      I have been a traveler and part of the travel industry for over 30 years. It wasn’t meticulously planned but rather evolved naturally. I followed my instincts, pursued my dreams, and earned some recognition in the field. Industry media hailed me as a pioneer in adventure travel gear. I was named Outdoor Industry Executive of the Year in the U.S. and Travel Goods Person of the Year, as my company, Eagle Creek, influenced how people around the world travel. My take on this experience is that I was just one member of the team, following my passion, working hard, having fun, and traveling the world through work and pleasure. I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity.
       After 30 years of hard work, with a bit of luck and riding the ups and downs of business and economic cycles, we sold the business. After three decades of building the company, it was time to enjoy the fruits of life and travel. We sold to VF Corporation, a giant, well-run, and highly accomplished company that has the capability and resources to take Eagle Creek to new heights. After completing this three-year management transition, I left the company, closing a long and meaningful chapter in my career.
      Eagle Creek’s exclusive distributor in China, UTC (China), invited me to serve as a collaborative consultant. This is a young and rapidly growing travel gear retailer in China, aspiring to become the No. 1 luggage and travel retailer in the country. It’s an opportunity to share my 30 years of experience and knowledge, and help establish another pioneering travel company in a brand-new market. For me, China is a fascinating place, as well as the fastest-growing market globally, and one that may one day become the largest in the world. The next chapter begins.
      Now, let me start from the beginning—how it all began. I was your typical kid from the New York suburbs, but my real travel story started on the streets of Cairo in 1979. Growing up, I wanted to be a lawyer. I lived in an affluent area, attended good schools, and had a comfortable childhood. My family wasn’t particularly adventurous—my dad worked in New York, and we vacationed at hotel resorts, never venturing more than two hours from home.
      I attended American University in Washington, D.C., studying government and public affairs, with a minor in photography as a form of creative expression. Away from home, my horizons began to expand. I met people from all over the U.S. and the world, and for the first time, I realized how differently people live in other places. As my experiences grew richer and more colorful, my narrow and straightforward life path became less appealing. As a senior in college, I was invited to the home of my Russian history professor. His home was eclectic and filled with artifacts from around the world and artworks he had collected during his travels abroad. Professor Trowbridge was the first true traveler I had ever met, and that youthful visit, along with his travel stories, changed the course of my life.
      My college friend and I had been planning our first big adventure after graduation for years. It would be our first trip abroad, and we wanted to visit some remote corners of the world—places where life was vastly different from our own. We studied world maps and guidebooks, weighed logistics and costs (we didn’t have much money), and settled on Egypt and Kenya. There was a long list of things I had to do and see, with the Great Pyramids of Egypt at the top; specifically, riding horses around the pyramids in the desert. We bought plane tickets, booked our first night, and in the summer of 1981, we packed our bags and set off. Two pampered young white guys were on their way to adventure. From the moment we landed in Cairo, I was blown away. We wandered through back alleys and markets, visited the ancient homes of pharaohs along the Nile, and rode Arabian horses deep into the desert to see the pyramids. Throughout our stay, we immersed ourselves in Muslim culture. We flew to Nairobi, photographed wildlife in Kenyan game parks, and took a train to Mombasa to explore the coast. We felt Africa. By then, we were hooked on world adventure. I wasn’t the only one obsessed with travel. We met other travelers everywhere, shared stories, became close friends, and felt like part of something bigger.
      Back home, I applied for a job as vice president at a relatively unknown outdoor company called Eagle Creek, traveling across the country. The vivid memories of my first adventure lingered in my mind and dreams. The original founders of Eagle Creek, Steve and Nona Barker, were true outdoor enthusiasts who started this backpack company to follow their dreams. Soon after, in California, I joined them. Barker’s business strategy quickly faded, and there was an urgent need to forge a new path. More than business partners, we were almost like friends. Many nights, the three of us would philosophize about life, business, and our passions in their backyard hot tub, mapping out a new direction for Eagle Creek.
        In the early 1980s, it was common for college graduates to spend a summer abroad, usually in Europe, backpacking and staying in hostels. Their choices for luggage and equipment were very limited, and there were no products offering the specific features they desired. Their options were limited to hard-shell suitcases from Samsonite or bulky backpacks designed for hiking. Eagle Creek became the first travel company to design and produce more functional soft luggage for exploratory travel, travel-specific backpacks that looked more like luggage in hotel lobbies, and functional travel accessories that offered better protection, security, and organization for valuables on the road. We had a new concept: serving everything a passionate traveler might need. We had a fresh vision, but unfortunately, the same old problem—little funding.
      We renamed the company Eagle Creek Travel Gear and updated the global branding, using (free of cost) photos of my and my friends’ travel experiences. Steve and Nona were smart designers, obsessively committed to high quality, so our gear quickly gained a reputation in the old travel industry. We soon had a unique concept, a product line, a lot of energy, little money, and our biggest challenge was the lack of an existing market. Outdoor retailers didn’t yet see themselves as travel gear providers, luggage stores were too focused on traditional suitcases, and our new exploratory travel concept needed understanding and acceptance. As the sales and marketing pioneer for Eagle Creek Travel Gear, I gave it my all to make it succeed, blazing trails being my job. And I was eager for more golden paths to grow our business.
      I became an evangelist for adventure travel and travel gear. Getting outdoor retailers to understand our backpacks wasn’t hard, but convincing luggage stores to believe in the growing volume of travel and the evolving ways travelers were exploring the world—that was our challenge. By the mid-1980s, at the request of outdoor and luggage stores, we hired a domestic sales force, opened two of our own stores, and published a mail-order catalog; this was before the internet. I traveled across the country extensively, pitching to stores, promoting, and motivating my sales representatives, who were initially skeptical, doing everything I could to drive sales. We almost made it when Eddie Bauer and LL Bean both approached us to ask Eagle Creek to design and manufacture travel products with their names and labels. It wasn’t the brand-building dream we had hoped for, but it brought in money.
      At Eagle Creek, I met my future wife, Judy Nakatomi, who had just graduated from college and was working in our retail store. We married in 1987, and Judy happily agreed to honeymoon in Thailand instead of checking into a series of luxury five-star hotels. My intuition about her being “the one” proved right... I’m not usually one for luxury. It was our first trip to Asia. Our general plan was a three-week itinerary, with our first night booked at a Thai hotel in central Bangkok. After 13 hours of flying, we arrived in Bangkok later that night, and our taxi driver couldn’t find the hotel, driving us through several Bangkok neighborhoods. Finally, at midnight, we found the place and went up to our room, which didn’t look great—nowhere near the honeymoon suite my wife had dreamed of. It was truly my wife’s first and last disappointing travel nightmare. I promised we’d find better accommodations in the morning and asked her to tough it out for the night. It was past midnight, and we had just flown 13 hours and arrived in Asia. When we woke up the next day, everything—including the hotel—looked different. The hotel manager found us a better room in the wing. Overjoyed because my wife was happy with it, I was thrilled. Judy and I had a wonderful honeymoon in Thailand. We explored Bangkok’s sights, floated down the river, rode Asian elephants, hiked through the jungles around Chiang Rai, and relaxed on the beaches of Koh Samui, which was still a relatively remote island at the time.
       Back to work—I was inspired by our travel experiences, which led me to think more deeply about how to serve others. Providing functional and durable travel gear is the foundation of the business, but it also includes educating travelers about the challenges they face on the road and how to best serve their personal experiences. Clearly, the Southeast Asia trip was quite different from Africa, entirely different from Europe, and different from travel within the U.S. I was committed to establishing the first company that combined an understanding of travel challenges, the romance of travel, the transformative nature of travel life, and how to prepare for it all.