Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Big Idea
The Outside Innovators

Jim Jannard
Sunglasses King
In 1975, 26-year-old Jim Jannard, then a sales clerk in a motorcycle shop, started Oakley with only $300. The company was named after his English setter, and the original product line consisted of a BMX bicycle grip featuring a sticky surface compound that Jannard called "Unobtanium." Next came motorcross goggles and then the trademark Eyeshade sunglasses, which Greg LeMond wore to victory in the 1986 Tour de France—making the insectoid shields the eyewear of choice among style-conscious hardbodies. Oakley, now a $1-billion-a-year juggernaut, claims 20 percent of the U.S. eyewear market and has expanded its line to include watches, clothing, and footwear.

Philippe Jeantot
Circumnavigator
Credit the French for giving us the world's most grueling endurance events. Philippe Jeantot, a two-time winner of the BOC Challenge sailing race (around the globe solo, four stops), raised the bar considerably in 1989 when, at age 37, he created the Vendée Globe (around the world solo, no stops). Thirteen boats set off from Les Sables-d'Olonne, France, for that first race; ten finished. Held once every four years, the Vendée has since become the planet's most prestigious endurance sailing event, offering up a first-prize purse of $113,000. Only one other nonstop round-the-world sailing competition has approached its stature: The Race, a wimpy-by-comparison affair that allows full crews.

Tony & Maureen Wheeler
Economy Trekkers
The snooty, luxe-obsessed travel-guidebook market changed forever in 1973, when Tony and Maureen Wheeler, young wayfarers on the international slackpacker circuit, produced their first guide to low-budget touring: Across Asia on the Cheap, a two-dollar, 96-page primer on the "Hippie Trail" snaking between Amsterdam and Kathmandu. The first printing of their second book, also on Southeast Asia, sold 15,000 copies. (Now in its 11th printing, the book has sold more than a million.) Today the Wheelers' Lonely Planet Publications, based in Melbourne, Australia, produces some 600 titles that bring in $42 million a year. Coming soon: their first guide wholly devoted to Afghanistan. "Why not?" says Tony. "I'm sure that right now people are saying to themselves, 'As soon as we can get in the door, let's go have a look.'"

Royal Robbins
Rugged Haberdasher
How fitting that a legendary climber with a leave-no-trace ethos and a memorable name would launch the country's love affair with outdoor clothing. Royal Robbins, the company named after the man, sold its first shirt in 1968. Decades later, apparel designers like Columbia and The North Face still draw inspiration from classic Royal Robbins products like the Billy Goat Short, a tough-as-leather cargo short that stands up to years of backcountry abuse. Robbins the man, now 66 and an avid whitewater paddler, sold his majority share of the business in 1999 to another entrepreneur in the company's hometown of Modesto, California. He's currently at work on his autobiography—a book we eagerly await.

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