A fishing lure has a calendar. So does a hunting jacket, a box of ammunition, a tent, and the specific piece of gear that matters for one short weekend in one particular town. Put it on the shelf too early and cash waits. Put it there too late and the season passes without you. Jeff Dunn has spent a career inside that narrow interval between inventory and opportunity.
In February 2025, Sportsman’s Warehouse named Dunn its chief merchandising officer. The job description covered merchandising, planning, and private-label development. The practical assignment was more vivid: help a national outdoor retailer become more precise about what it sells, where it sells it, and when it is ready.
Dunn arrived with more than 35 years in omnichannel merchandising and leadership. Twenty-five of those years ran through Walmart and Sam’s Club, where his remit touched buying, planning, replenishment, and product development. The categories ranged from footwear and baby hardlines to hunting, fishing, camping, sport shooting, exercise, and team sports. That range matters. A merchant who moves between soft goods and hard goods learns that products differ, but the operating questions repeat: Who is the customer? What are they trying to do? How much depth will the demand support? Can the supplier and the store be ready together?
The education of a merchant
Dunn graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 with a BA in Communications. He also played varsity soccer for the Panthers on an athletic scholarship. It is tempting to turn that into a tidy metaphor about teamwork. The more useful observation is simpler: both soccer and merchandising punish bad positioning. Being a few steps away from where the play develops can be the whole result.
His early retail work included Joseph Horne Co., the Pittsburgh department-store name, before the long Walmart and Sam’s Club chapter. At Sam’s Club, he worked in senior buying and divisional merchandising roles. At Walmart, he eventually led large merchandise divisions, including footwear and sporting goods. By the time he left, Dunn had worked not only on selecting products but on the machinery that keeps them available: forecasts, replenishment, supplier relationships, product creation, and aligned teams.
After Walmart, he became president of Item Insight and later chief merchandising officer at Galaxy Universal. There, his work included leadership connected to Hi-Tec, the outdoor footwear brand. In a 2022 announcement about Hi-Tec sponsoring the Run Catalina trail series, Dunn was identified as both chief merchandising officer and brand president. The moment placed him on a different side of the commercial table: not only choosing what reaches a customer, but helping shape the brand and the reason it belongs there.
“As a lifelong advocate for outside adventures, I share a similar passion as many of our customers.”Jeff Dunn, on joining Sportsman’s Warehouse
The shelf is a balance sheet
Sportsman’s Warehouse did not recruit Dunn into a blank canvas. The company was already working through a retail reset. Its stores had been reorganized to improve sight lines and selling space. Inventory was cleaner. E-commerce was growing. The next phase demanded sharper choices about assortment and working capital.
The company’s diagnosis was unusually frank. It had tried to be too many things to too many people, spreading inventory dollars across excessive breadth while running out of the products customers cared about most. Its answer was a “narrow and deep” strategy in hunting and fishing: improve availability in the 20 percent of key products that drive 80 percent of the business.
That ratio is familiar. Executing it is not. Every retailer knows a small group of products carries disproportionate demand. The merchant still has to identify them by store, negotiate supply, place the order, time the delivery, protect enough cash for the next season, and resist the appeal of one more speculative SKU. A shelf is not merely display space. It is the visible edge of a balance-sheet decision.
Depth beats decorative breadth
Dunn’s appointment put an experienced sporting-goods merchant at the center of those choices. CEO Paul Stone said Dunn’s leadership was making an immediate impact within two months of his arrival. The compliment came with a measurable context. Fishing was already growing with lower year-over-year inventory, evidence that better depth and timing could raise sales while making working capital more productive.
National scale, local weather
Outdoor retail resists clean standardization. A shoe can sit in the same mall in many states; a fishing assortment has to understand the water nearby. Weather, local species, hunting regulations, terrain, and short “micro-seasons” all change what ready means. The assortment for Alaska should not be a copy of the assortment for the lower 48.
Sportsman’s Warehouse began giving every store a merchandising voice. Field knowledge from outfitters could travel back toward the merchant team, while data and supplier conversations pushed in the other direction. In Alaska, a market the company acknowledged it had historically served too generically and too late, localized assortments and marketing helped produce high-single-digit sales growth in the second quarter of 2025.
Listen locally
Store outfitters see the weather, species, brands, and customer questions that a national spreadsheet can flatten.
Buy with depth
Put working capital behind the core items customers expect, rather than distributing it thinly across the catalog.
Time the season
Outdoor demand has a clock. Regional readiness can matter as much as price or product selection.
Complete the trip
Merchandise the whole customer task, including related gear and consumables, instead of a lonely centerpiece item.
This is where Dunn’s career becomes useful rather than merely long. Walmart and Sam’s Club teach scale. Sporting goods teaches specificity. Footwear teaches fit, fashion, and product cycles. Brand leadership teaches the supplier’s constraints. Sportsman’s Warehouse asks him to combine those perspectives without letting one erase the others.
His public comments emphasize collaboration. On taking the job, Dunn said he wanted to build on the company’s legacy, work with suppliers, and stay close to its outfitters. That is a map of the information system around a merchant. Suppliers know what can be made and delivered. Outfitters know what people ask for. Planning teams translate both into inventory. The customer’s decision is the final vote.
A career built on useful readiness
By fiscal 2025, Sportsman’s Warehouse reported that fishing sales had risen 10.2 percent and hunting and shooting sports 4.2 percent from the prior year. E-commerce grew 6.6 percent and represented more than a fifth of total sales. Same-store sales increased 1 percent. Those are company results, shaped by many people and decisions, not a personal scorecard for one executive. They do show the operating environment Dunn was hired to strengthen: better in-stocks, seasonal and regional relevance, digital reach, and a tighter focus on core outdoor categories.
The less obvious part of his brief is private label. Sportsman’s Warehouse has said its private-label and special-makeup penetration trails many sporting-goods peers, leaving room to develop products that fill assortment gaps and improve margins. Dunn’s product-development background makes that opportunity a natural extension of the same logic. A house brand is most useful when it solves a specific customer need at the right value, not when it exists to add another logo to the shelf.
The system also has to work online. A local store may carry roughly a fraction of the company’s full assortment, while the wider catalog remains available through e-commerce and drop shipping. That changes the meaning of “narrow.” It does not require hiding every specialized product. It means deciding which goods deserve scarce shelf space and deep local inventory, while letting the digital channel carry more of the long tail. Dunn’s omnichannel background sits directly inside that problem. The store can be immediate and specific; the website can be broad. The hard work is making them feel like one retailer, so a customer can research, buy, collect, and return without learning the seams of the organization.
The product is visible. The judgment is hidden: a customer, a calendar, a supplier, a store, and a dollar all meeting at once.
Dunn’s story is not the familiar executive tale of a dramatic pivot. It is a story of accumulation. A communications degree. A soccer scholarship. Department-store buying. Club retail. Mass retail. Footwear. Sporting goods. A brand presidency. Then an outdoor specialty chain trying to recover the precision that scale can blur.
In that sense, his work is modest in the best way. The customer should not have to notice the planning system. They should notice that the correct rain layer is available, the local lure is in stock, the ammunition is priced clearly, and the seasonal setup arrived before they did. Readiness looks uneventful from the aisle. From the merchant’s desk, it is the event.