Ed Stack stands with his arms crossed, surveying the wall of colorful basketball shoes near the entrance of Dick’s Sporting Goods’ House of Sport in Pittsburgh’s Ross Park Mall. The vast selection of around 2,400 pairs of Nike Air Jordans, Under Armour Currys and more—known as the “Footwear Deck”—is a key part of Dick’s strategy to stand out in the digital age.
A separate soccer-skewed section, House of Cleats (pictured on page 92), has at least 300 additional pairs. “People really want to feel it, touch it, try it on and experience it,” explains Stack, 70, Dick’s executive chairman.
That’s why there’s also a 31.5-foot indoor climbing wall visible directly over Stack’s shoulder, nearby batting cages, golf bays and even an 18,000-square-foot outdoor sports field for customers to use. Plus there are technicians on hand to restring racquets, lace baseball gloves and sharpen ice skates.
These bells and whistles are features of a new jumbo store format that Dick’s is opening across the country. Each House of Sport is double to triple the size of a regular 50,000-square-foot location. The Pittsburgh megastore, the closest one to Dick’s corporate headquarters in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania—where Forbes interviewed Stack in November—opened last April in a long-abandoned Sears. The third-biggest Dick’s location to date at 140,000 square feet. (The biggest, nearly 150,000 square feet, is in Salem, New Hampshire.) Fifteen more of these immense complexes are already open, with plans to retrofit up to 100 of Dick's 725 U.S. locations by 2027. (The company has another 136 “specialty” stores, including Golf Galaxy and outdoor chain Public Lands.) Forbes estimates the retailer will spend nearly $2 billion on this expansion.
Dick’s is doubling down on brick-and-mortar at a time when many retailers are downsizing or shuttering locations—more than 6,480 stores in the U.S. closed last year, the highest number since 2020, according to data from Coresight Research.
It’s just the latest gamble from Stack, who has spent four decades obsessing about ways to beat his competitors; he bought the company from his father, the original founder, in 1984. “I was always an athlete—a mediocre athlete, but I loved the competition,” he says, sipping a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. (The only sport he plays these days is golf.) “Ed is always pushing himself to be better, his company to be better, his team to be better and his partners to be better,” says Nike CEO Elliott Hill, describing him as “courageous and competitive.” He has known Stack for 20 years. Nike is a key supplier of Dick’s, accounting for about 24% of its $13 billion in 2023 sales.
Stack installed this mindset in his management team too. “We’re constantly looking around corners. And we joke—we say it’s not a joke, but we have what we call productive paranoia,” says Lauren Hobart, Dick’s CEO since 2021. “But that’s actually the root of a lot of our success. We don’t take a lot of time looking backward or resting on our laurels.”
“Ed Stack is a genius who inherited a mom-and-pop sporting goods store and turned it into a national retail powerhouse,” says Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, which sold about $3 billion of branded product at Dick’s last year.
It has been a winning formula. Dick’s, which has outlived a number of now-defunct rivals such as Sports Authority, Herman’s and Modell’s (see “Foul Play,” page 94), is one of just a handful of retailers to record consistent same-store sales growth since the pandemic, according to Morgan Stanley equity analyst Simeon Gutman. (Others include Walmart, Costco and O’Reilly Auto Parts.) Revenue is expected to hit a record of up to $13.3 billion this year, up from $8.8 billion in 2019, a more than 50% jump. Its stock is up more than 800% in that time, including 60% in the last year. Stack, who has not sold a single share of his voting stock since taking the company public in 2002 and who remains the biggest individual shareholder, is now worth nearly $6 billion.
Business didn’t look so good back in 2018. Sales were stagnating as Dick’s fought for relevance against online retailers like Amazon and Walmart and began phasing guns out of its stores. It also took a hit as some of its brands began selling directly to consumers, or, in Under Armour’s case, distributing to lower-priced stores such as Kohl’s. Stack quickly took action. “The brief I gave everybody was that we needed to sit down and design the concept that will kill Dick's Sporting Goods,” Stack, dressed in a plaid navy suit, explains from a conference room hidden behind a set of large wooden doors in the back of the Pittsburgh store. "If someone opened the store that we're going to design across the street from us, we'd be out of business, we wouldn't survive."
Covid-19 was a boon to Dick’s as outdoor sports such as golf, running and kayaking exploded in popularity; at one point in 2020, Dick’s sold out of kayaks in nearly 500 of its locations.
It wasn’t just luck, though. After closing all its stores in March that year, it took just two days for Dick’s to open for curbside pickup, a feat that was possible only because of an earlier overhaul of its e-commerce site that brought the technology in-house.
This hybrid model of buying online and picking up in person has proven deeply popular with customers. “It’s the convenience,” Hobart explains. “If you’re running to your kid’s game and realize you don’t have a cleat, you know the size is in stock and that you can quickly get to the field.” Shoppers also like knowing ahead of time that what they want is available. Dick’s has five distribution centers, but today more than 90% of sales are fulfilled by the stores, yet another factor fueling the House of Sport push: More square footage can house more inventory for faster delivery. “There’s no other retailer I cover that’s had a turnaround like Dick’s has,” says Morningstar analyst David Swartz. Says Stack of the recent changes: “We do virtually nothing the same.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1740409964/articles/xQFBHyRQR1740484497087/1777761477.jpg]
Gaining Traction Dozens of Dick's Sporting Goods stores are being tricked out with features like House of Cleats, which sells spiky shoes for seven sports including football, soccer and field hockey. Most are made by powerhouse brands like Nike, Adidas and Puma.
This isn’t the first time Ed Stack has reinvented his family business. He was 13 when he started working for his father at the original Dick’s, then called Dick’s Bait and Tackle. The elder Stack had started the business as a teen in 1948 as a modest fishing supplier in Binghamton, New York. Ed spent his summers, vacations and Christmases in the 600-square-foot store, unloading merchandise from trucks and attaching price tags. The oldest of five children, Ed was expected to work at the store full-time after graduating from high school. But there was one problem: “I hated every minute,” he recalls.
Ed and Dick had a strained relationship. Stack has attributed this to his father’s short temper. (Even so, there is a framed picture of Dick Stack in every Dick’s location.) In 1973, Ed, an admittedly subpar student, left home for St. John Fisher University in Rochester, New York, with the dream of becoming a lawyer. He dropped those plans when his father's heart temporarily stopped following a double-bypass surgery from which he never fully recovered. Ed returned home to join the business after graduation in 1977.
This time was different: Ed fell in love with retail, though he continued to clash with his father, who lived for two more decades. The younger Stack wanted to expand, while his dad, who nearly went bankrupt after opening a second location in 1953, didn’t want to take any risks. Seven years in, things reached a breaking point. “My dad was a pretty colorful guy, and he looked at me and said, ‘You think you’re such a smart SOB, so go down to the bank, get your own line of credit and buy me out!’ So that’s what I did,” says Stack, who along with his four siblings bought their father’s two stores in Binghamton. They agreed in 1984 to pay the older Stack $1.25 million over 20 years at a 12% annual interest rate plus the price of leasing his two stores for 25 years-Dick's terms. They paid the rest of the sum out to their stepmother following Dick’s death in 1998 after a battle with dementia caused by his cardiovascular problems. (Ed’s siblings have not been involved with the business in decades, and none owns over 5%.)
Finally in charge, Ed got to work expanding Dick’s inventory beyond hunting and fishing gear. He forged relationships with Nike (around 1978) and Adidas (1980). When it came to Dick’s brick-and-mortar growth, Stack studied Walmart founder Sam Walton and mimicked his idea of opening stores in concentric circles around the company’s launch point (in Dick’s case, Binghamton). Stack drove around small and medium-size cities scouting the number of swing sets in people's yards; he also looked at the popularity of youth sports leagues, the number of colleges nearby and the weather—after discovering his offerings sold better in colder climates.
Soon there were stores in Syracuse, New York; Hartford, Connecticut; and Erie, Pennsylvania. Around this time he brought in the company’s first outside investors: venture capitalists Michael Barach of Bessemer Venture Partners, Jerry Gallagher of Oak Investment Partners and Janet Hickey of Scout Group—as well as Denis Defforey, a cofounder of French supermarket chain Carrefour and an early advisor of Dick’s, who together infused more than $16 million.
The rapid expansion soon backfired. “I joined in March [1995] and realized by August we were going to run out of cash,” recalls Mike Hines, Dick’s chief financial officer for 12 years until 2007. “I was pissed.” A key problem: The new stores were too big. “We did the calculations, and the size of the store that was most effective was 50,000 square feet,” he adds. The stores they were building were up to 70,000 square feet.
Dick’s dug itself out of the hole by securing a $140 million loan from GE Capital, contingent on the existing investors putting up more capital. They did-to the tune of $35 million—resulting in Stack losing majority control of his family business. Dick’s halted new store openings for 18 months and focused on monitoring inventory and margins. By 1997, the company had largely bounced back from the crisis. Three years later, Stack borrowed another $60 million from GE Capital, this time to buy out his investors. Over the next two years, Dick’s hit $1 billion in sales. Stack then took the company public, vowing to always maintain majority voting control going forward.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1740409964/articles/xQFBHyRQR1740484497087/2182208780.jpg]
Another crucial moment for Dick’s came after a 19-year-old former high school student shot and killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. Two weeks later, Stack announced he was banning the sale of all assault rifles and guns to anyone under age 21. “What happened in Parkland had a really profound impact on me,” says the billionaire, who later flew to Florida to meet with the families of victims. “I’m not much of a crier. I hadn’t cried that much since my mother passed away. It got to a point where I said, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this story any longer.’”
Dick’s destroyed the $5 million worth of semiaut...
A separate soccer-skewed section, House of Cleats (pictured on page 92), has at least 300 additional pairs. “People really want to feel it, touch it, try it on and experience it,” explains Stack, 70, Dick’s executive chairman.
That’s why there’s also a 31.5-foot indoor climbing wall visible directly over Stack’s shoulder, nearby batting cages, golf bays and even an 18,000-square-foot outdoor sports field for customers to use. Plus there are technicians on hand to restring racquets, lace baseball gloves and sharpen ice skates.
These bells and whistles are features of a new jumbo store format that Dick’s is opening across the country. Each House of Sport is double to triple the size of a regular 50,000-square-foot location. The Pittsburgh megastore, the closest one to Dick’s corporate headquarters in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania—where Forbes interviewed Stack in November—opened last April in a long-abandoned Sears. The third-biggest Dick’s location to date at 140,000 square feet. (The biggest, nearly 150,000 square feet, is in Salem, New Hampshire.) Fifteen more of these immense complexes are already open, with plans to retrofit up to 100 of Dick's 725 U.S. locations by 2027. (The company has another 136 “specialty” stores, including Golf Galaxy and outdoor chain Public Lands.) Forbes estimates the retailer will spend nearly $2 billion on this expansion.
Dick’s is doubling down on brick-and-mortar at a time when many retailers are downsizing or shuttering locations—more than 6,480 stores in the U.S. closed last year, the highest number since 2020, according to data from Coresight Research.
It’s just the latest gamble from Stack, who has spent four decades obsessing about ways to beat his competitors; he bought the company from his father, the original founder, in 1984. “I was always an athlete—a mediocre athlete, but I loved the competition,” he says, sipping a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. (The only sport he plays these days is golf.) “Ed is always pushing himself to be better, his company to be better, his team to be better and his partners to be better,” says Nike CEO Elliott Hill, describing him as “courageous and competitive.” He has known Stack for 20 years. Nike is a key supplier of Dick’s, accounting for about 24% of its $13 billion in 2023 sales.
Stack installed this mindset in his management team too. “We’re constantly looking around corners. And we joke—we say it’s not a joke, but we have what we call productive paranoia,” says Lauren Hobart, Dick’s CEO since 2021. “But that’s actually the root of a lot of our success. We don’t take a lot of time looking backward or resting on our laurels.”
“Ed Stack is a genius who inherited a mom-and-pop sporting goods store and turned it into a national retail powerhouse,” says Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, which sold about $3 billion of branded product at Dick’s last year.
It has been a winning formula. Dick’s, which has outlived a number of now-defunct rivals such as Sports Authority, Herman’s and Modell’s (see “Foul Play,” page 94), is one of just a handful of retailers to record consistent same-store sales growth since the pandemic, according to Morgan Stanley equity analyst Simeon Gutman. (Others include Walmart, Costco and O’Reilly Auto Parts.) Revenue is expected to hit a record of up to $13.3 billion this year, up from $8.8 billion in 2019, a more than 50% jump. Its stock is up more than 800% in that time, including 60% in the last year. Stack, who has not sold a single share of his voting stock since taking the company public in 2002 and who remains the biggest individual shareholder, is now worth nearly $6 billion.
Business didn’t look so good back in 2018. Sales were stagnating as Dick’s fought for relevance against online retailers like Amazon and Walmart and began phasing guns out of its stores. It also took a hit as some of its brands began selling directly to consumers, or, in Under Armour’s case, distributing to lower-priced stores such as Kohl’s. Stack quickly took action. “The brief I gave everybody was that we needed to sit down and design the concept that will kill Dick's Sporting Goods,” Stack, dressed in a plaid navy suit, explains from a conference room hidden behind a set of large wooden doors in the back of the Pittsburgh store. "If someone opened the store that we're going to design across the street from us, we'd be out of business, we wouldn't survive."
Covid-19 was a boon to Dick’s as outdoor sports such as golf, running and kayaking exploded in popularity; at one point in 2020, Dick’s sold out of kayaks in nearly 500 of its locations.
It wasn’t just luck, though. After closing all its stores in March that year, it took just two days for Dick’s to open for curbside pickup, a feat that was possible only because of an earlier overhaul of its e-commerce site that brought the technology in-house.
This hybrid model of buying online and picking up in person has proven deeply popular with customers. “It’s the convenience,” Hobart explains. “If you’re running to your kid’s game and realize you don’t have a cleat, you know the size is in stock and that you can quickly get to the field.” Shoppers also like knowing ahead of time that what they want is available. Dick’s has five distribution centers, but today more than 90% of sales are fulfilled by the stores, yet another factor fueling the House of Sport push: More square footage can house more inventory for faster delivery. “There’s no other retailer I cover that’s had a turnaround like Dick’s has,” says Morningstar analyst David Swartz. Says Stack of the recent changes: “We do virtually nothing the same.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1740409964/articles/xQFBHyRQR1740484497087/1777761477.jpg]
Gaining Traction Dozens of Dick's Sporting Goods stores are being tricked out with features like House of Cleats, which sells spiky shoes for seven sports including football, soccer and field hockey. Most are made by powerhouse brands like Nike, Adidas and Puma.
This isn’t the first time Ed Stack has reinvented his family business. He was 13 when he started working for his father at the original Dick’s, then called Dick’s Bait and Tackle. The elder Stack had started the business as a teen in 1948 as a modest fishing supplier in Binghamton, New York. Ed spent his summers, vacations and Christmases in the 600-square-foot store, unloading merchandise from trucks and attaching price tags. The oldest of five children, Ed was expected to work at the store full-time after graduating from high school. But there was one problem: “I hated every minute,” he recalls.
Ed and Dick had a strained relationship. Stack has attributed this to his father’s short temper. (Even so, there is a framed picture of Dick Stack in every Dick’s location.) In 1973, Ed, an admittedly subpar student, left home for St. John Fisher University in Rochester, New York, with the dream of becoming a lawyer. He dropped those plans when his father's heart temporarily stopped following a double-bypass surgery from which he never fully recovered. Ed returned home to join the business after graduation in 1977.
This time was different: Ed fell in love with retail, though he continued to clash with his father, who lived for two more decades. The younger Stack wanted to expand, while his dad, who nearly went bankrupt after opening a second location in 1953, didn’t want to take any risks. Seven years in, things reached a breaking point. “My dad was a pretty colorful guy, and he looked at me and said, ‘You think you’re such a smart SOB, so go down to the bank, get your own line of credit and buy me out!’ So that’s what I did,” says Stack, who along with his four siblings bought their father’s two stores in Binghamton. They agreed in 1984 to pay the older Stack $1.25 million over 20 years at a 12% annual interest rate plus the price of leasing his two stores for 25 years-Dick's terms. They paid the rest of the sum out to their stepmother following Dick’s death in 1998 after a battle with dementia caused by his cardiovascular problems. (Ed’s siblings have not been involved with the business in decades, and none owns over 5%.)
Finally in charge, Ed got to work expanding Dick’s inventory beyond hunting and fishing gear. He forged relationships with Nike (around 1978) and Adidas (1980). When it came to Dick’s brick-and-mortar growth, Stack studied Walmart founder Sam Walton and mimicked his idea of opening stores in concentric circles around the company’s launch point (in Dick’s case, Binghamton). Stack drove around small and medium-size cities scouting the number of swing sets in people's yards; he also looked at the popularity of youth sports leagues, the number of colleges nearby and the weather—after discovering his offerings sold better in colder climates.
Soon there were stores in Syracuse, New York; Hartford, Connecticut; and Erie, Pennsylvania. Around this time he brought in the company’s first outside investors: venture capitalists Michael Barach of Bessemer Venture Partners, Jerry Gallagher of Oak Investment Partners and Janet Hickey of Scout Group—as well as Denis Defforey, a cofounder of French supermarket chain Carrefour and an early advisor of Dick’s, who together infused more than $16 million.
The rapid expansion soon backfired. “I joined in March [1995] and realized by August we were going to run out of cash,” recalls Mike Hines, Dick’s chief financial officer for 12 years until 2007. “I was pissed.” A key problem: The new stores were too big. “We did the calculations, and the size of the store that was most effective was 50,000 square feet,” he adds. The stores they were building were up to 70,000 square feet.
Dick’s dug itself out of the hole by securing a $140 million loan from GE Capital, contingent on the existing investors putting up more capital. They did-to the tune of $35 million—resulting in Stack losing majority control of his family business. Dick’s halted new store openings for 18 months and focused on monitoring inventory and margins. By 1997, the company had largely bounced back from the crisis. Three years later, Stack borrowed another $60 million from GE Capital, this time to buy out his investors. Over the next two years, Dick’s hit $1 billion in sales. Stack then took the company public, vowing to always maintain majority voting control going forward.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1740409964/articles/xQFBHyRQR1740484497087/2182208780.jpg]
Another crucial moment for Dick’s came after a 19-year-old former high school student shot and killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018. Two weeks later, Stack announced he was banning the sale of all assault rifles and guns to anyone under age 21. “What happened in Parkland had a really profound impact on me,” says the billionaire, who later flew to Florida to meet with the families of victims. “I’m not much of a crier. I hadn’t cried that much since my mother passed away. It got to a point where I said, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this story any longer.’”
Dick’s destroyed the $5 million worth of semiaut...
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Forbes (Digital) - 1 Issue, February/March 2025