It all started in 1992 with a cheating girlfriend, a new Mountaineer, and two adventure loving best friends that wanted to start selling camping equipment. Fast forward 28 years, and Moosejaw has become a leader in the outdoor recreation space with a thriving community of “dirtbags” (who are not actually dirtbags, they’re just customers that aren’t afraid to get a little dirty).
SocialLadder’s very own, Katie, had a chance to sit down with Rebeka and Mike from the Moosejaw team, who are passionate about cultivating a strong community of dirtbags and harnessing the power of community and word of mouth. Rebeka manages relationships with Moosejaw’s partners and affiliates to drive performance marketing goals alongside Mike, Moosejaw’s Social Media Marketing Manager, who oversees their marketing efforts they spiritedly refer to as the “madness”.
Aside from keeping things fun for your dirtbags, what does Moosejaw believe in as a brand?
Moosejaw’s focus has always been getting our customers outdoors safely and keeping things fun for the community. Through comedic community marketing tactics and a strong enthusiasm for the outdoors, Moosejaw is really focused on opening the outdoors to everyone and at a fair price.
For 2021, one of our main focuses will be to increase inclusivity and diversity at Moosejaw, and across the outdoors industry. We are working hard to make sure that the outdoors are truly open to everyone. Moosejaw will be participating in The Outdoor CEO Diversity pledge that connects leading outdoors brands with inclusion advocates to advance the representation for people of color across the outdoors industry in all types of positions from executive teams to brand ambassadors. You can find more info on the pledge here.
Along with getting outdoors safely and opening the door to everyone, we also are driven to help provide outdoor education resources. We provide our community with guides to getting outdoors — like how to choose the right gear for your next hiking trip, or waterproofing your gear for those rainy day adventures.
How do you show your community and customers how much they mean to Moosejaw?
Our customers, aka our “custies”, make the world go round and we try to show them our appreciation in many ways throughout the year.
From Moosejaw Rewards Dollars in our customer rewards program, to our 20 Days of Giveaways, to our Mystery gifts, our customer service and satisfaction are top priorities for Moosejaw.
Moosejaw Rewards Dollars allow customers to earn rewards and exclusive offers when they purchase. We also do 20 Days of Giveaways around the holidays to share our amazing products and prices with our community. We do other promotions to reward our customers, like mystery gifts with purchases, personalized poems, and more.
Let’s touch on the poems for a second. Can you tell us more about these personal poems to your customers?
So for Valentines day, the team thought it would be fun to offer our customers a custom poem for a loved one of their choosing. They gave us their name and few details about their special someone. We expected a few responses to the offer…1,000 submissions later, our team became borderline professional poets. Everyone had a lot of fun with this holiday promotion and it created some great connections within our community.
Outside of personalized love haikus, how does Moosejaw foster personalized connections with its community of dirtbags?
Some fun ways we create a personalized experience for our customers include pop-ups at our retail locations, like happy hours and film screenings. We also send funny personalized emails that go out from Mike, our email marketing manager. It’s not like your normal newsletter, we aren’t trying to market anything, but rather, create a little fun and connect with our community via email.
We also have seen many personal connections and memories created in the Moosejaw community through the Moosejaw flag program. The Flag program has been a tradition and opportunity for customers to receive a Moosejaw flag to take on their next adventure. These flags have been all over the world from Antarctica to on top of the Tanzania Canyon border to base camp at Mount Everest. Our dirtbags have helped share our brand with the world by flying their flags during their summits or submitting photos with their flags adventuring across national parks.
Are there any ways that Moosejaw is giving back to their communities?
Yes! As I mentioned, we do our 20 days of giveaways around the holidays. Our team is also participating in an incredible initiative this year called “Adopt-A-Family” which matches donors with families who struggle with abuse and poverty to provide these Survivors with help over the holidays.
Here’s a bonus question! If you could pick one song to describe your community, what would it be?
Junior Senior’s classic “Move Your Feet”.
Thank you, Rebeka and Mike! To learn more about Moosejaw and join the community, visit them at Moosejaw.com or on Instagram.
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