One of the most well-known media personalities in the outdoor space now has a connection to a Louisville startup.
That’s because Outdoors.com, the site that is run under the co-leadership of Bear Grylls, has become the first client of Holler Commerce, a white-label social commerce platform.
Grylls, a British adventurer, first gained widespread attention for his TV show, “Man vs. Wild,” which debuted in 2006 and paved the way for a series of spinoff shows. At last check, his Instagram account had 6.7 million followers.
Brad Luttrell, co-founder and CEO of Holler Commerce, told me that the partnership was “kind of serendipitous.” As fate would have it, he met Sam Savage of Nashville, Tennessee-based Savage Ventures right around the same time when his team started talking about creating what would become a spinoff of GoWild Alpha Inc. in December 2022.
“We told him what we did at GoWild and told him about our [e-commerce] technology, and he said, ‘Oh, my gosh … We’ve looked at doing this and it’s really challenging. There might be a partnership here,’” Luttrell said.
The deal, which consists of a one-year contract, officially was signed in June, but went live at the end of September.
Outdoors.com launched in January 2023, according to information on the site, as a joint effort between Grylls and Savage Ventures, which has a long list of industry-centric content marketing sites in its portfolio, including AmericanSongwriter.com.
Luttrell, who has a journalism background, said that he appreciated the editorial arm of Outdoors.com and the other sites that Savage runs.
“It’s been fun to work with a group like this and kind of get back into the publishing side a little bit,” said Luttrell, who co-founded GoWild in 2017 with Zack Grimes, Donovan Sears, and Chris Gleim, before the name changed to GoWild Alpha Inc. in 2019.
The site had a pre-existing online merchandising shop beforehand, but mainly consisted of T-shirts and other site-branded gear.
Luttrell said that his team — which consists of 11 full-time employees and 14 part-time employees — was able to integrate their database into the site with relative ease.
I last spoke with Luttrell back in May when Holler Commerce was being launched as “a turnkey, AI-powered social commerce platform.” At the time, his company had approximately 600 brands in its database of outdoor-related equipment and gear that was initially started for GoWild, which was named one of our 2022 Startups to Watch.
Now, that database contains a little less than 900 brands with more than 2 million SKUs (stock keeping units), which are also accessible to anyone who partners with Holler Commerce. Luttrell said that he and his team added 250 new brands in the hiking and camping space when they were building up the offerings for the Outdoors.com e-shop.
Lutrell, who was named to our Forty Under 40 list in 2021, said that there are probably four or five other partnerships in the works to be unveiled in the early part of 2024.
In the here and now, though, the Holler Commerce has been working on another vertical that is a self-serve model, which is catered to micro influencers (think podcasters, YouTubers, social influencers, etc.). The beta test of the product will be rolled out in November.
Under the new model, an influencer can set up a profile and choose the brands they want to sell. The influencer pays a monthly fee, but also receives a percentage of the sales that are made from their e-commerce platform.
Luttrell said the hope is to have 40 influencers signed up by next year, which should not be a problem given that more than 30 have signed up to take part in the beta test.
