How a Ski Store Thrives in a City That Barely Freezes
Sun & Ski Sports started as a Midwest ski warehouse, moved to Houston in 1980, and built a four-decade business on one bet: the customer buying a snowboard in December wants a paddleboard in June.
In the sporting-goods trade, a ski store is supposed to make its money in a few cold months and hold its breath the rest of the year. Sun & Ski Sports has spent 45 years ignoring that rule. It runs a full snow shop - boots, bindings, mounting bench and all - in metropolitan Houston, a place where a hard freeze is a news event. The store is busy anyway. The reason it is busy is the whole story.
The company began as Tennis and Ski Warehouse, a startup run by outdoor enthusiast Barry Goldware in the Midwest. Goldware saw an untapped market in winter apparel, and in July 1980 he moved the operation to Houston and renamed it Sun & Ski Sports. The name was the strategy in miniature: sun and ski, warm and cold, one shop for both ends of the calendar. Four and a half decades later that idea has grown into roughly 30 stores across about a dozen states and an online store, sunandski.com, that keeps winning national awards.
01 / The betOne customer, four seasons
Seasonality is the quiet killer of specialty retail. Sell only skis and you starve in July; sell only kayaks and you starve in January. Sun & Ski Sports never picked a side. It stocks snow sports, water sports, cycling, running and hiking under one roof, on the theory that the person shopping for a snowboard in winter is the same person who wants a paddleboard when it turns hot. Serve that person year-round and the seasonal cliff flattens out.
By September 2006 the chain had reached 18 brick-and-mortar stores and sold gear for six activities: watersports, snow sports, cycling, skating, running and camping. The category list has shifted with the times - pickleball, wake foils and outdoor lifestyle goods have joined - but the multi-season logic has not changed.
Look closely at the mix and it reads like a calendar. Snow season fills the ski, snowboard and outerwear walls. Warm months move kayaks, paddleboards, wakeboards, water skis and wetsuits. Cycling and running never really clock out - a bike needs building in April and a tune-up in October, and runners buy shoes in every kind of weather. Layered on top is a steady base of apparel, footwear and casual outdoor lifestyle goods that sells regardless of the forecast. No single category has to carry the year, which is exactly the point.
02 / The moatWhat Amazon can ship, and what it can't
A retailer that sells the same branded gear as everyone else needs a reason to exist beyond price. Sun & Ski's answer is the workbench. You can buy skis online and pick them up mounted. You can order a bike and have it built. Wetsuits get fitted, boots get sized, gear gets tuned and rented. Those are the parts of the transaction a shipping box cannot do, and they are the parts that bring customers back.
Those services are not a loss-leader courtesy; they are how a mid-market retailer earns loyalty and margin at the same time. A mounted ski is a reason to come back. A properly fitted boot is a reason to trust the next recommendation. Rentals lower the cost of trying a new sport, which turns a curious first-timer into an owner. Every hands-on interaction is also a conversation, and conversations are where a knowledgeable staffer closes the sale that a search bar never could.
Company president Karl Salz is blunt about where the durability comes from. “The biggest reason for our longevity has been customer service,” he has said. “That's kind of been the key to our business.” It is a deliberate narrowing. “We can't be the best at everything,” Salz added. “We know we need to be great at everything, but we really were going to be the best at customer service.” Pick one thing to win, be competent at the rest - a strategy that has aged well against both the big-box crowd and the online-only crowd.
03 / The positioningAdventure for all, elitism for none
The company's mantra is “Adventure For All,” and it is more than a tagline - it is a floor plan. Beginner gear and expert gear share the same racks, which is unusual. Hardcore specialty shops can intimidate a first-timer; mass merchants can't answer a hard question. Sun & Ski aims for the seat in between: enough selection and expertise to satisfy the serious rider, enough warmth to welcome the person buying their first pair of skis.
Who actually walks in? The customer base skews toward the Sun Belt and beyond - families outfitting a first ski trip, weekend cyclists and runners, lake-and-coast paddlers, and serious enthusiasts who know exactly which binding they want. Vendor relationships matter to serving all of them, and Salz is pointed about which partners the company keeps. He favors brands that understand “retail partners are their bread and butter” rather than treating shops as a “necessary evil” - a posture that keeps the good product flowing and the advice honest.
That inclusiveness shows up on the shelves as a deliberately broad brand wall - names a beginner recognizes next to names a specialist demands.
04 / The screenWinning online without leaving the store
The stereotype of a regional chain is that it fumbles the internet. Sun & Ski does not fit it. The company has been named a Newsweek Best Online Shop three years running, and in 2023 it ranked #8 in the Outdoor category with a 7.88 composite score - judged on usability, trust, service, payments, delivery and technical performance. Fewer than 1,000 retailers earned the recognition out of thousands assessed.
Behind the storefront sits a modern stack - a Kibo Commerce platform, Klaviyo for lifecycle marketing, Zendesk for support and Affirm for point-of-sale financing - run by a marketing organization that treats e-commerce as its own profit-and-loss line rather than a side channel. The pitch to customers is simple: buy however you like, online or in person, and let the store handle the physical work either way.
05 / The marketWhere it fits
Outdoor retail is a crowded field. At one end sit national giants like REI and Dick's Sporting Goods, whose Public Lands banner chases the same outdoor customer. Online, Backcountry and Moosejaw compete for the enthusiast's cart. At the other end are the independent ski, bike and paddle shops that own the local expert relationship. Sun & Ski sits in the middle band - larger and broader than the corner shop, more specialized and more service-heavy than the big box - a position it has defended through ownership changes and the retail turbulence that has closed many of its peers.
Ownership shifted in 2012, when Frank Stanley and Steve Rath became Co-CEOs and Salz joined as president; the business operates under parent company Retail Concepts, Inc. Some of its character stays private-company quiet. During the 2020 pandemic, leadership handed out appreciation bonuses to corporate, distribution-center and retail employees - a move that never trended online, which is rather the point.
06 / The recordFour and a half decades, in brief
- 1980A warehouse heads south. Barry Goldware moves his Midwest ski and tennis warehouse to Houston and launches Sun & Ski Sports.
- 2006Eighteen stores, six sports. The chain spans watersports, snow, cycling, skating, running and camping.
- 2012New leadership. Frank Stanley and Steve Rath become Co-CEOs; Karl Salz joins as president.
- 2020Bonuses in a hard year. Appreciation bonuses go to corporate, warehouse and store staff during the pandemic.
- 2023Best Online Shop, again. A third straight Newsweek recognition, ranking #8 in the Outdoor category.
The through-line is unglamorous and durable: a family-founded retailer that decided its edge would be the human parts of shopping - fitting, mounting, advising, tuning - and then kept those edges sharp while adding a website good enough to win awards. It is not a growth-story rocket. It is a business that figured out how to have a good quarter in every season, and has quietly kept having them.