About Realtree
Bill Jordan entered the hunting industry in 1983, when he started Spartan Archery Products in a back room in his father’s boat dealership in Columbus, Georgia. Spartan manufactured T-shirts at a local mill, and Bill then sold the finished goods to a variety of large retail customers across the country. The commodity garment trade is a tough, low margin business that relies on high volume for survival. That is not an easy business environment for an established company, and nearly impossible for an upstart. So Bill Jordan pinched pennies and fished bass tournaments on the side to help pay his single employee- himself. In the meantime, he constantly searched for ways to separate his company from the crowd.
In 1986, very early in the camouflage revolution, Bill decided to try his hand at designing a camouflage pattern. For hours, Bill sat in his parents’ front yard sketching and coloring an exact replica of the bark of a giant oak tree. Coincidentally, Bill’s mother, Kitty, still lives in the house, and the tree that started it all still stands guard over the front yard.
Bill believed that by layering the images of twigs and leaves over a vertical bark background, he could create a three-dimensional appearance that would match a variety of terrain, and also make his pattern distinct. Again, using local mills, Bill fought through the printing process until he finally had a set of camouflage clothing to photograph.
Always the promoter, Bill began to photograph the garments on bowhunters in tree stands. He sent the images at regular intervals to the hunting clothing buyers across the nation. He did this every month for about seven or eight months leading up to the 1986 SHOT Show. “We couldn’t get the pattern to stay on the pants,” remembers Bill. “It rubbed off. I had only one suit and no additional fabric, so I kept sending photos. December rolls around, and the buyers are all saying, ‘Send us some garments’. I didn’t have any garments. The pattern rubbed off. I couldn’t tell them that, so I just sent them some more photos.”
Things got tight leading up to the show. It was a miracle that things came together at all. Bill finally began working with Eastbank Textiles, who solved the printing problem just days before the show. In fact, a week before the show Bill was hand-carrying about 30 yards of printed fabric from the mill to his home, when the airline lost it. They sent the box to Columbus, OH instead of Columbus, GA.
“I finally got the fabric on Monday and the show started that Thursday,” said Bill. “I rushed it to the manufacturer and they made the basic garments by Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon I flew out for the SHOT Show.
“I have naked mannequins at the SHOT Show, and I’m sitting in Columbus waiting to get pants sewn. Then we are dressing naked mannequins at midnight, the night before the show started. The anxiety at that point was unbelievable. I had no credibility in this business and here I was - after teasing all these buyers - and I’m dressing my mannequins with the only garments I’ve got in the whole world just hours before the show starts.
“I have no manufacturer making this clothing- just Spartan, and Spartan has no money. I couldn’t even sell to the first retailer if I wanted to. I had no licensing agreements to work with, and no real idea what I was going to do next. I only knew I had a few pieces of clothing, a 20 X 20 foot booth and hopefully some very influential people stopping by to see me.
“On opening morning of the show, at 9:30, here comes the Bass Pro Shops buyer. Ten minutes later the Oshman’s buyer walks into the booth. After another ten minutes, here comes the Wal-Mart buyer. I have all three of them in the booth at the same time. I’m thinking, ‘Now what am I going to do?’”
Wally Switzer, from Wal-Mart, asked Bill if he was going to be able to make the garments to fill their orders. Bill told him that he never could begin to handle the orders. It takes a lot of money to fire up a clothing manufacturing business and Bill was out of cash. Wally told Bill that Wal-Mart had a company called Walls that made some of their hunting clothing. The Bass Pro buyer said the same thing, and so did the Oshman’s buyer. The name Walls kept coming up.
“Then they asked me, ‘Who’s your hat company? Who’s your glove company?’” added Bill. “I said, ‘Hmmm, I don’t know, who do you want it to be?’”
The three of them stayed in Realtree’s booth for a long time that morning, talking and asking questions. Finally Wally Switzer left, and then came back with his contact at Walls. Walls wanted to buy the fabric from Eastbank Textiles, manufacture the garments with it, and then see how well they sold. That’s when licensing was born.
Eastbank Textiles had been responsible for solving the printing process, so they became Bill Jordan’s first licensee. They paid the license fee on each yard of fabric and passed the cost on to the manufacturer. No one really knew how to set up such an agreement, and the contract that Bill hammered out with Eastbank Textiles became the model for all the agreements he has done since.
As a humorous aside, Spartan-Realtree Products (the company's new name) couldn’t afford to pay for the entire 20 X 20 foot SHOT Show booth that year, so Bill worked it out so that he could pay half up front and the rest on arrival.
Representatives from the SHOT Show stopped by the booth several times during show hours looking for Bill to collect the remainder of the money, but each time Bill was conveniently gone. Bill didn’t have the money to pay them at that time, so he ducked out the back of the booth whenever one of his employees saw the officials stalking down the hallway. At the end of the show, Bill finally found a way to pay his obligation to the SHOT Show.
There are dozens of stories like this. Much of Realtree’s early growth was financed on a shoestring budget. In fact, the company’s first facility was an empty church that they rented. The upstairs office served as the office space for Bill and two or three employees. He stored his boxes in the baptismal room, and the sanctuary was his first warehouse. But these were exciting times, and each small success was celebrated by the entire staff.
Early in the licensing process, Bill realized that the promotion of the camouflage pattern was important to his company’s success. He also knew that manufacturers would only promote their own garments, and wouldn’t care which camouflage pattern was on them. It became obvious that Bill would have to do all the promotion himself in order to create demand for the pattern. Bill poured his efforts and meager finances into every possible avenue that could create positive publicity for Realtree. In many ways he became a pioneer in the way products are promoted in the outdoor industry.
The risk paid off, and as a result, vision has become Jordan’s greatest attribute, and promotion his company’s greatest strength. Since that stumbling start in the late 1980’s, Realtree has steadily grown to become one of the strongest brands in the hunting industry. Today, Realtree employs more than 80 people in Columbus, Georgia, and has operations in Europe. From that first licensee in 1986, Realtree has grown to include more than 800 licensees.
About Bill
Most people know Bill Jordan as the originator of the Realtree and Advantage Camouflage brands, the host of both the Monster Bucks video series and the Realtree Outdoors television show now seen on ESPN2. This is what you see in the media and on the screen: the professional Bill. But when you get behind the scenes, there is much more to Bill Jordan.
Bill grew up as the youngest of four children (brother, Butch, sisters Katherine and Val) to a middle-class family in a rural home on the outskirts of Columbus, Georgia. Bill’s father, Leon, owned a marine dealership that prospered when the Corp of Engineers built Lake Oliver on the Chattahoochee River that separates Columbus from Phenix City, Alabama.
Lake Oliver backed right up to the Jordan home, providing fabulous bass fishing just a stone’s throw from the back porch. Leon was a devoted hunter who also owned a small farm where he and Bill often hunted dove and deer.
The Jordan home was alive with activity - the local meeting place for all the neighborhood kids. Bill grew up playing football, basketball and baseball on a nearby vacant lot. He roamed the hills and fished the impoundment. In fact, Kitty remembers many times when Bill would get up at dawn, jump in his boat and fish until the last minute before grabbing a quick bite and heading off to school.
It was the classic American boyhood, and it shaped Bill’s athletic skills and his love of the outdoors. He also gained tremendous support and permanence from his family. Though Leon is now deceased, Kitty still lives in the family home where Bill grew up, more than six decades after the family moved there!
Bill attended Columbus High School, where he starred in track, basketball and football. Baseball was actually Bill’s best sport as a youngster, but he gave it up before entering high school, because it was very difficult to play four sports at the high school level. Bill was a natural athlete. He didn’t have to work at it. Bill and all his friends grew up hunting, fishing and playing sports. That’s just what boys did in Columbus, Georgia in the 1960’s.
Bill earned all-state honors as a receiver on their winning football team. Several major colleges recruited him heavily in both basketball and football, including the Universities of Georgia, Auburn, Tennessee, and Mississippi.
Bill decided on football, his best sport. After narrowing his choices to Auburn and the University of Mississippi, Bill decided on the University of Mississippi (known as Ole Miss), primarily because of the abundance of good hunting and fishing within a short drive of campus. At Ole Miss, Bill played on two Bowl teams and started several games despite a problematic hamstring injury that sidelined him several times throughout his college career. During his college football years, one of Bill’s roommates was the great quarterback Archie Manning, who remains a good friend to this day.
When Bill graduated from college in 1973, his injuries kept him from considering a career in professional football, so he came back to Columbus to settle into the family boat business. Leon, Bill, and Bill’s older brother Butch all worked in the family trade. Bass fishing tournaments were very popular at that time. Being an avid angler who was also in the boat business, Bill naturally made the progression into competitive fishing. Many customers and friends were fishing the tournaments. They were a popular social activity in the Chattahoochee Valley.
Bill competed well at local tournaments and gained a reputation as a top bass angler. He won several tournaments and even entertained the idea of fishing the newly formed Bassmasters tournament circuit. But ultimately Bill knew he had to stay close to home to help his father and brother.
Even after starting his own business, Spartan Archery Products, in 1983, Bill continued to fish the local bass circuit to make money to help pay his employees. At that time Bill was able to earn from $2,000 to $10,000 per year. He stopped competing in these events after starting Realtree in 1986.
Spartan Archery Products grew from Bill’s desire to own his own business in the hunting or fishing market. He began by thinking of the things that hunters and anglers buy every year. He decided that camouflage T-shirts were a commodity item that he could easily manufacture locally and sell nationally. Bill was able to make inroads into several major retailers with his Spartan brand T-shirts but the margins were low, making it a tough business.
By the mid-80’s, the modern camouflage revolution was just starting. Bill was one of the first to join the market. He felt that overlaying a leaf pattern on top of a vertical bark pattern would produce a three-dimensional effect that would blend better with hardwood trees. He literally used paper and colored pencils, while sitting in his parents’ yard, to sketch the bark from one of the big oak trees that grew there. That tree, which still stands today, was the inspiration for the entire Realtree line.
After a few false starts and some trying years in the late 1980’s, Realtree grew quickly through the 1990’s to become a household name in the hunting industry. Bill has never stopped innovating. His company stays on top of the latest developments in fabric design and printing so that it can advise customers (licensees who pay a royalty to use the patterns) on the best ways to maintain quality and performance. Despite the use of sophisticated computers, digital cameras and photo-realistic printing, Bill continues to oversee the entire process of creating and launching each new camouflage pattern.
Bill Jordan is also a pioneer in hunting television and video. In the late 1980’s he began to realize the value of these mediums to reinforce his brand and sell his camouflage patterns. In July of 1991, Bill hired David Blanton, from La Grange, Georgia to launch the wildly popular Monster Bucks video line and Realtree Outdoors television show.
On a personal side, Bill also developed an interest in NASCAR racing in the late 1980’s, and was fortunate enough to share many hunting camps with two of the best drivers of his generation, Davey Allison and Dale Earnhardt, both now deceased. This eventually led to a friendship with Dale Earnhardt’s car owner, Richard Childress. Today, Realtree is a secondary sponsor on the Childress number 29 car driven by Kevin Harvick.
A successful business takes an incredible amount of time and energy to grow and maintain. Throughout much of the late 1990’s, Bill’s hectic schedule forced him to travel more than 250 days per year, conducting business and making appearances. Recently, he has been able to cut that schedule in half to spend more time with his wife Shannon and their young son Tyler.
Bill’s family is his greatest joy. He and Shannon participate in every aspect of Tyler’s development and spend their summers watching Tyler play Little League baseball. Bill also loves the time he and Tyler share hunting and fishing. (You will see Tyler starring in Monster Bucks videos, and on television.)
Despite his business success, Bill remains a man of the people, never forgetting his humble start in the back room of his father’s marine dealership. He is as comfortable in a group of Iowa farmers as he is meeting with the president of a large corporation.
There have been many setbacks along the way to success, and times when the future was very uncertain. But Bill was persistent, and his true genius for promotion eventually brought him, and Realtree, to where they are today.
Bill Jordan is a true all-American success story.
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