Chase Anderson on Utah State’s Outdoor Product Design Program & the Outdoor Recreation Archive [EP 258]

Jan 19, 2021

Chase is helping future outdoor leaders navigate their paths into outdoor careers and building a comprehensive collection of catalogs and other documents from the early days of the outdoor industry and more.

Show Notes

Intro to the Outdoors

I'm from Utah, born and raised. It's hard to not get into this industry. I have parents who took us out. Camping is what we did. I have a mom who was perfectly fine with taking us out of school to go skiing. And that family time and the outdoors is always the most important thing. So when you have parents like that, who are willing to get you out of school to go play that's a good thing.

Utah State University Outdoor Product Design and Development

Utah State University started this Outdoor Product Design and Development program in 2015. And a year after it had started, they advertised a role for someone to do industry outreach for the program. And I thought, okay, I could work for one brand or I could go work for a program where I get the chance to talk to brands across the industry.

So that seemed like the dream and to be able to go back to my Alma Mater and work with students and be a part of that, and being a part of the campus atmosphere was really interesting. So I made that jump. And that's what I do full-time is our industry outreach and marketing for the program.

Outdoor Archives

The archives grew out of that program. The program has a history of gear class and the faculty member that runs that, and our special collections team are at the university and do all the archival work.

We got together and just thought, wouldn't it be cool if we had primary documents and print materials that the students could actually study instead of just talking about the outdoor, the history of the industry. Actually, see it and study it in the archive. And so we started reaching out to some of the industry contacts that we had built and just started asking if they had old stuff that they wanted to be preserved.