Sandpoint's De LaVergne rides into retirement

By DAVID GUNTER

Feature correspondent

SANDPOINT — Over the course of 30 years as a downtown Sandpoint retailer, Marc De LaVergne has seen just about everything the economy had to throw at him and his business partner, Kevin Nye.

Together, they steered the Outdoor Experience through good times and bad, through times of rapid growth and at least two serious recessions. Last week, De LaVergne retired from a job he described as being “fun and relaxed.”

“That’s one of the things I learned over the years,” he said. “To make it fun and not to add any undue pressure on myself.”

De LaVergne’s history in retail turned out to be a long one, fueled by a love for people, a knack for fixing bikes and an appreciation of the cash rewards for a job well done.

“This whole thing started when I was 9 years old, picking strawberries,” he said. “But I only got the job because my mom was the field boss.”

Every summer would find the boy working in the field, looking forward to the end of the season, when he would buy a new bike — always a Schwinn. The first one, he recalled, was a Schwinn Stingray with banana seat, shift knob and a slick for the back tire.

By his early teens, De LaVergne was working in a men’s clothing store and moonlighting in pool maintenance for a local swim center.

“As a kid, I loved having money in my pocket,” he said.

When he headed off to college in Ashland, Ore., on a swim scholarship, De LaVergne already had a taste for retail, so it wasn’t long before he found a job there, as well. As it turned out, that business foreshadowed his later partnership in a downtown Sandpoint shop.

“I started working for a store that was exactly the same as what I owned for 30 years,” he said, adding that the owner trained him to become a bike mechanic and told him the skill just might come in handy one day.

Right out of college, De LaVergne did a stint as a park ranger for Oregon State Parks, but quickly found it wasn’t his cup of tea.

“I liked retail — it’s so social,” he said. “Being a park ranger is a lonely sport.”

In 1980, De LaVergne and his wife, Joyce, moved to Sandpoint, where he took a job working at Schweitzer Mountain Resort and a shop called North Country Sports, then located on north Boyer. He remembers the year, month and day the couple rolled into town quite readily, as it was mid-May and the area was still covered with ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption.

Before long, De LaVergne and Nye found themselves working together at a downtown store then known as the Outdoor Connection. Circumstances soon turned things on their head, leaving that business without owners, still staffed with workers and, suddenly, owned by the bank.

It was that same bank that planted the idea of ownership when it asked the future partners if they might be interested in making an offer on the store.

“We were excited to get going,” De LaVergne said. “It was actually a really good business and we knew we could make it work.”

Nye — who De LaVergne calls “the smart one” — had a business degree, which nicely complimented his dual backgrounds in clothing sales and bike repair. They signed on to a 15-year loan, changed the name to the Outdoor Experience, worked seven-days-a-week as the only two staffers for a full year and so began a partnership that stood the test of three decades-worth of business cycles.

“A 30-year partnership is an unusual thing,” said De LaVergne. “It’s very much like a marriage, where you say, ‘Let’s just keep this thing going.’”

More than anything else, the ability to ride the downturns and thrive in the face of mounting competition became hallmarks of that collective brand.

“The recessions were important,” said De LaVergne, who clearly remembers the challenging business climate of the early-1980s and the equally daunting years that started in about 2008.

When those recessions hit, the partners learned to keep things lean without appearing forlorn.

“The trick is — even when you’ve reduced your inventory by a third — to have people look around and think you’re still in business,” De LaVergne said.

Fancy footwork also became necessary as the outdoor products market broadened and both small retailers and big box stores alike jumped on the bandwagon.

“More and more people wanted to duplicate what we were doing, so the competition was fierce,” the partner said. “This is a business where you need to constantly reinvent yourself.”

De LaVergne’s latest invention will involve recasting himself as a retired guy — a role he has only just begun to ponder. For the past 30 years, he and Joyce, who he married in 1974, have had polar opposite schedules. Before she retired from her job as a teacher in Sandpoint, she had summers and holidays off. Her husband, on the other hand, worked in an industry where those same periods marked the peak selling times. At long last, their calendars have aligned.

“I’m just getting comfortable with the idea that Joyce and I can get up in the morning and say, ‘It’s a beautiful day — let’s go kayaking, or huckleberry picking or playing on the beach.’ ”

Decisions, decisions.