Longtime Adirondack boat maker hopes pack canoe will find fit in canoe-loving Minnesota
By Zachary Matson
Minneapolis is a city of lakes. Trails surround and link them, parks provide a peaceful escape nearby, and locals enjoy a sunny paddle on the water. Soon, a familiar sight in the Adirondack Park may become common on those lakes.
Hornbeck Boats, the longtime maker of the iconic Adirondack pack boat, is expanding to the Midwest city this month. At its first retail outpost outside its homebase in Olmstedville, a grand opening is scheduled for April 19 at the new shop in northeast Minneapolis.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
Hornbeck hopes that its lightweight boat paddled like a kayak will find a new market among canoe-loving Minnesotans, and serve as a beachhead to push the boat to more waterways outside the Blue Line.
The Adirondack Explorer interviewed Josh Trombley, who runs Hornbeck Boats, as he helped set up the store earlier this month. The following has been edited for clarity and length:
Q: You’re in Minneapolis as we speak. How is the store coming along?
A: The buildout is done at this point. We’re carrying a lot of different things. We’re having our boats, but we’re also going to have a bunch of different accessories and some of the brands that we carry in the Adirondacks, and we’re also going to expand and carry a couple of other boat brands and stand up paddle boards out here as well. So we’re getting the store set up to look nice and get enough products to fill it out. It’s a pretty large space — about 3,300 square feet.
Q: What will the shopper’s experience at this new space be like compared to Olmstedville?
A: Somebody who wants to come visit Hornbeck Boats in the Adirondacks, they’re coming specifically because they want a boat, or they already have one, and they want something that goes with it. It’s kind of a destination that you need to get to. Here, we’re a retail operation, we’re a paddle sports shop. Hornbecks are our main product and are the first thing you see as you walk in the door, but the experience itself is more of a paddling sports retailer. We don’t have a body of water on site, so we’re going to do demos differently than we do in New York. Back East, we’re able to do demos on our pond, whereas here demos are going to be more scheduled. There’ll be a day each week where people can find us at a local body of water, and we’ll have various boats for them to try. If they reach out to us ahead of time and say, “Hey, I’m coming this Saturday, and I really want to try these boats,” we’ll make sure we have those specific boats with us that day.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
Q: Where did the idea to expand come from and why pick Minneapolis?
A: The idea of having another store has always been something that I was interested in back when I was brought on board. When Pete [Hornbeck, the company’s founder,] and I first started talking about it years ago, my point was we’ve got all these boats. We can build more boats than we sell in Olmstedville, and the biggest barrier for our customers is where we’re located. We can’t really ship these things. So expanding was always something I wanted to do. We could have set up a dealer network or we could build our own dealership, which was my plan.
So why Minneapolis? I wanted to stay within a couple days’ drive, because initially we’re the ones moving the boats. I also needed to be in an area where I felt there was a good demand for boats like ours, but also where paddling was popular. So I was looking where we could go from Hornbeck. We could go north to Maine, where there’s definitely demand for our boats, but there’s a lot of the same issues that we have at Hornbeck. I thought about heading south, but we actually are able to transport boats up and down I-95 fairly easily. So the idea that I had was coming to the Midwest, where paddling is a big thing. There’s a big paddle sports event that occurs in Madison, Wisconsin every March called Canoecopia. We had a booth there and found that there was a tremendous demand for our boats out this way. I could have gone back toward Chicago. There’s a lot of people, but paddling is not necessarily as ingrained in the culture. I just decided to go all the way to Minneapolis. We started the process of looking for space more than a year ago, and had some starts and stops. We finally found a space that we really like and think works really well for us.
Q: There is already this paddling culture in Minneapolis and Minnesota. They have the Boundary Waters, Wenonah is based there, so what’s the pitch you’ll be making to people about why Hornbecks are something to check out?
A: I think that there’s various boats for various purposes, and I don’t think that our boats necessarily replace your Wenona or your North Star or whatever it is you are loading up with gear and taking to the Boundary Waters. That’s not what we do. We’re building lightweight pack boats, boats that you can put on your shoulder and carry for longer portages, boats that you can put on your car by yourself. It’s going to be similar to our market out East: our paddlers are people that just want to go paddling on a Saturday, or Tuesday after work when it’s nice, or go fishing early in the morning. The biggest barrier for many of them is, yeah, they love paddling, but getting their boat, loading it on the car, taking it off the car, getting into the water, that is a big problem for many people when you’re paddling heavier boats, and that’s a problem that we solve.
Q: What’s the reception been so far? Do you have a sense of what people in the Minnesota paddling community think of you all setting up shop there?
A: We did a soft open and we’ve had quite a few people stopping in and poking around. It’s still the preseason, but they are coming in and they’re interested. We’re carrying a brand of Minnesota composite boats called Grey Duck. They’re built in Winona as well. There’s a 16-foot solo, 17-foot tandem, and an 18-foot tandem or three person. We’re carrying paddle boards. So we’ve added those things to fill out the store a little bit. We’ve had people come in because they were interested in the paddle boards. We had people come in because they were interested in Grey Duck boats. The doors have only been open a week, and we haven’t really told anybody yet we’re here. The sign just went up on the side of the building last Friday.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
Q: So it’s set up as two separate businesses?
A: What Pete created out there at Hornbeck Boats is a boat builder more than anything. We have a retail shop [in Olmstedville] because you need to sell them, but we’re a boat manufacturing company. The goal of this new store, Hornbeck Boats and Outdoor Supply, is that we are a customer of Hornbeck Boats. We are a dealer for Hornbeck Boats. It’s a separate part of the same family. We’re not going to risk the established company. We’re doing something that we’ve never done before, something that is a big step for Hornbeck Boats.
Q: When you were brainstorming this kind of thing with Pete, did he throw ideas of locations out there?
A: He was an artist, and he wanted to design boats. He liked doing that part, but he didn’t necessarily like the business side. When he wanted to come up with a way to increase sales, his answer was let’s design another boat. I thought the other way to get to a new market is to go to a different geographical market. He and I kicked it around a little bit. He was less willing to take a risk on something like this. He slowly built that company over the course of 50 years. For him, it was never a business. It was a hobby that he really loved doing. When I was hired, it was okay, I need to make a living, and I need to make sure that everybody else is making a living. I have a different mindset. My thought was to take what we already have, refine and improve it, and find other people who want it.
Q: Do you see this as the first of more expansions? One thing at a time, obviously, but where are you going next?
A: I’m not closed off to anything but that’s not where my focus is right now. Pete always had this perception that we are this tiny little boat builder in the Adirondacks. The more time I’ve spent in the industry talking to people, I realized we’re not that small. We’re a big, small company. When we do 1,000 boats in a year, Wenonah and Northstar don’t do a lot more than that. Being set up to expand further is definitely a possibility. That’s down the road and also dependent on how interested the next generation is.
Q: We know what an Adirondack pack boat is, but what are the conversations like when you are pitching this to people who aren’t familiar?
A: It’s not quite a canoe and it’s not quite a kayak. It’s similar to a canoe, it’s open so you don’t have to fight your way into a cockpit, but like a kayak, you sit on the bottom so you have more stability and you use a double-bladed paddle. There’s no learning curve to use a double-bladed paddle. Using a single blade, you have to work to learn the strokes. We tell people it’s the child between the two and then we hand them one. Once you hand them one, that changes the conversation.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
A smaller woman who may have needed to paddle a 45-pound kayak could instead get a 11-foot Hornbeck that weighs 15 or 16 pounds. Our strength is we give people the freedom to go out and paddle whenever they want.
The new Hornbeck store is located at 945 Broadway St. NE, Suite 100, Minneapolis
Love my 11 NT Hornbeck…my 43 lb Wenonah was getting heavier every year..with a ww kayak background I wanted a responsive ,light weight canoe and never regretted it…”bce”best canoe ever.