Running-Gear Executive Is Back in Race After Bust

Once a darling of the running-gear boom, Moss Brown & Co. stumbled on its way to becoming a $100-million-a-year business in the nation’s capital.

Now, its founder is starting over in a storefront 80 miles northwest of Yellowstone National Park.

The grain elevators and muddy pickups in this tiny farming community are a far cry from the pricey Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., where Henry Barksdale’s Moss Brown & Co. built a reputation as a rising star of the running and outdoor clothing mail-order business.

In the heady days of 1984, Barksdale was pictured on the cover of the Washington Post magazine and Moss Brown was named to Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies in America.

But Barksdale’s boom went bust in Washington--the victim, some said, of trying to run too fast. After working through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, his enterprise has emerged with a new name and a relatively clean slate.

“As far as I know of, everyone has been taken care of,” Barksdale says of the customers who filed claims against Moss Brown for undelivered merchandise.

Easier Pace at Runwest

Barksdale’s new firm, appropriately called Runwest Inc., has acquired the Moss Brown trademark, but the company is a much smaller and perhaps less ambitious version of the original.

Back in Washington, Barksdale thought nothing of firing off 12 million catalogues and churning out Gore-Tex running suits by the tens of thousands.

Today, in Belgrade, employees take a more leisurely pace, quietly stuffing garments into mailing envelopes by hand while listening to music on a radio.

“I feel really welcome here,” the 59-year-old Barksdale told the Bozeman (Mont.) Daily Chronicle in a recent interview. “Everybody is so open. It’s sort of like when I was a kid growing up in St. Louis. I’d forgotten that people were really like that.”

While describing banks in Washington as “basically just computers,” Barksdale says the vice president of Valley Bank of Belgrade walked over and introduced himself the day Barksdale moved in.

“That’s a different experience than you’d have back in D.C.,” he said.

With $8 million in sales in 1984, Moss Brown was being hailed as the L. L. Bean of the running set.

“If we were doing $15 million a year in sales, I’d probably still be there,” Barksdale said. “But I’m not sure I’d be happy.”

What happened to him in Washington is a classic case of reaching too far too fast.

“We made good money until 1983,” when Moss Brown made a profit of $200,000, Barksdale said. “Then I decided to turn it into a big company.”

Expanded Mailing List

From mailing orders in the back of his Georgetown retail store, Barksdale moved the mail-order business into a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in suburban Alexandria, Va. And he expanded the mailing list, achieving those 10 million to 12 million mailings a year, by purchasing or renting costly mailing lists from other firms.

These expansion moves added huge costs to the business without adding enough revenue to pay for them--at a time when the running boom was beginning to fade.

Don Chilcutt of Direct Media, an Edmond, Okla., broker of mailing lists for mail-order companies, agrees with that sober assessment.

Barksdale was “prospecting” for new customers by leasing or buying millions of new names to add to his mailing list, Chilcutt said, but his known buyers couldn’t support the expansion.

“You can’t support a 10 million mailing with only 123,000 customers,” Chilcutt said.

Last March, Moss Brown filed for bankruptcy protection, having piled up $2.15 million in debts, $1.7 million of it unsecured.

Mark Holmstrup, an investigator at Alexandria’s office of consumer affairs, says his office received about 150 complaints from customers of Moss Brown, most coming at the end of 1986 and in early 1987.