How Bass Pro Shops Founder Johnny Morris Celebrates The Outdoors Through Retail

When I first met Johnny Morris, I was immediately greeted by what seemed to be an ever-present smile. The affable 75-year-old billionaire founder of the Bass Pro Shops empire has plenty of reasons to grin, having built one of the country’s most beloved brands around his life’s passion for hunting and fishing. What started at age 21 as eight square feet of retail space in the back of his father’s Springfield, Missouri, liquor store is today nearly 200 retail locations with some 200 million customers generating $6.5 billion in annual sales.

Visit a Bass Pro Shops store and you feel as though you’ve landed somewhere near the heart of the hunting and angling universe. The mountains of immaculate animal dioramas celebrating all manner of the world’s great game species, aquariums the size of lakes with names, and dramatic wildlife sculptures and other art could rival some American natural history museums.

While hunting and fishing are often solitary pursuits, these destination stores are community hubs where America’s 60 million hunters and anglers—and many others—can converge to pay homage to an endearing lifestyle. While here, outdoors people of all walks of life will check out the latest gear to make them more successful and comfortable while pursuing their favorite quarry in the nation’s woods, fields, marshes, and waters.

A Bass Pro Shops store is roughly what many hunters and anglers might build if they won the lottery. Brimming with big game products, I may enter a Bass Pro Shops to buy a new dog collar, cooler, or a case of ammo, but the chances are I’ll leave with the seeds of new horizons sewn in my sporting aspirations.

Today, Bass Pro Shops stores are top five destinations in nine states, including number one in Missouri, Morris’ home state. The flagship Bass Pro in Springfield welcomes some four million visitors each year, the store’s sprawling footprint creating a sensory overload for first time visitors.

Over the years, I’ve made a habit of taking visiting foreign friends (mostly fellow hunters and anglers) to our local Bass Pro store in Denver. Guests from Africa, Europe, South America, and the South Pacific have all wanted to visit one of the stores they’ve heard so much about. Their reactions differ little from a child arriving at a Christmas tree brimming with gifts. Morris might consider selling blindfolds (camouflage, of course) outside the store entrances while placing cameras inside to capture the first look wonder in real time—perhaps with a live (trail) cam feed for all to see.

For Morris, however, the stores have also become retail conservation locations—chances to not only celebrate the work of scores of non-profits dedicated to ensuring the future health and well-being of America’s fish and wildlife, but places where customers can contribute directly to those efforts.

Through a program that gives shoppers a chance to round up to the nearest dollar or contribute even more for conservation, the company’s Outdoor Fund, a non-profit, has generated more than $100 million for conservation in the last five years alone, helping support efforts of most of the hunter-angler funded conservation charities.

It’s that reinvestment into America’s outdoor heritage that has further helped solidify Bass Pro’s standing as a champion of American sportsmen. That’s something not lost on many hunters and anglers who, if given the choice of supporting a retailer who invests in their lifestyle or one that doesn’t, will choose the latter.

It’s a strategic move by Bass Pro to defend their core market against other retail giants like Wal-Mart and Amazon, but it’s also part of Morris’ fundamental belief that sportsmen have always been, and will continue to be, the true heavyweights of the conservation movement. It isn’t solely the money that Bass Pro brings to the conservation arena that makes a difference, however, it’s also the influence the retail giant can wield when it comes to conservation legislation and advocacy for hunters and anglers.

“When you look at the breadth and scope of what Johnny Morris has done for America’s sportsmen and women over his career,” says Charlie Potter of the Chicago-based Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, a conservation idea incubator, “it’s simply unprecedented.”

“Having spent plenty of time around Johnny Morris in the field,” says Jeff Crane, President and CEO of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based hunter-angler advocacy organization, “it doesn’t take long to understand that conservation is central to the DNA of the Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s brands.”

“The two companies are truly unparalleled leaders in advancing key conservation initiatives in our country,” says Ducks Unlimited CEO Adam Putnam.

The Bass Pro-Cabela’s Outdoor Fund has been instrumental in helping DU’s conservation efforts across the Prairie Pothole Region of western Canada and the Dakotas where some 60 percent of the continent’s waterfowl nest. It’s just one of scores of such Bass Pro- Cabela’s efforts multiplied across our continent.

While Amazon might want to be all things to all people, Johnny Morris is content to be all things to all outdoors people.

To bolster his position in the hunting and angling retail space, Morris acquired rival Cabela’s in 2017 for $4 billion. Together, the two brands have some 40,000 employees operating their stores in nearly every state along with an ever-expanding online shopping presence.

Cabela’s founder Dick Cabela once shared with me, “We don’t sell a lot of things people need, but we do sell a lot of things they really want.” Morris, whose stores are filled with gear that are passports of sorts to some of the greatest days in an outdoor life, would understand.

In addition, Bass Pro Shops also operates White River Marine Group, offering a portfolio of industry-leading boat brands. One more element in the Bass Pro line-up of outdoor lifestyle offerings is Big Cedar Lodge, a stunning resort located on Missouri’s famed 40,000-acre Table Rock Lake. It’s the flagship property in the Johnny Morris Nature Resorts collection, yet another opportunity for him to showcase the virtues of the outdoor lifestyle.

For those traveling through Missouri, the 350,000-square foot Wonders of Wildlife Museum and Aquarium is one more example of Morris’ vision to introduce the outdoors to an increasingly urban population. Watch as a busload of school kids arrive at the museum and marvel at one of the country’s top aquariums and you’ll witness never-ending smiles. The outdoors—whether indoors or not—has that effect.

It’s the same kind of child-like smile that Morris still wears to this day, for he’s made the impossible dreams of his youth a reality.