THE ROLE
Joined as Senior Art Director for the hunting team, one of three people setting creative direction for Bass Pro's in-house hunting brands: SHE Outdoors, Redhead, Cabela's, Instinct, Pursuit, Gun Dog, Northern Flight, and more.
And then…
Six months in, I was chosen to run point on creative for the 2022 World's Fishing Fair: a five-day event at the Springfield, MO flagship store expected to draw 500,000 people. My creative manager and a fellow SAD supported as needed while managing other day-to-day work. We had six weeks.
At that scale and timeline, the job wasn't producing assets, it was making calls fast and standing behind them. We printed so much that we bought out every roll of large-format vinyl within a three-hour radius, shipping prints from St. Louis and Kansas City. We planned, sequenced, and delivered over 600 individual pieces, from VIP badges to a 75'x25' double-sided archway to a 300-foot red carpet tracing the history of Bass Pro Shops, on a timeline with no room for a second pass.
THE FAIR
THE GAP
Not long after the fair, our creative director resigned, and work started funneling straight to the CMO/COO. The department had no unified creative leadership. When our creative manager left a few months later, My co-SAD and I were formally reassigned to the creative manager overseeing brand, whose role had largely meant managing an external agency (QUAD) rather than an in-house design team. He came up through marketing at Cabela's, not design, before the acquisition. Our workload merged with what he already oversaw, and in practice the creative decisions for both portfolios increasingly fell to us, even though the org chart didn't say so.
Our scope grew accordingly: creative ownership across 22 brands, including Bass Pro itself. Campaigns for every major sales event. Visual direction for three years of store openings. Direct work with CEO/Owner Johnny Morris on personal projects. I was setting direction and making brand calls at a scale usually reserved for a much larger leadership team, with far less structure to lean on.
THE RANCH
I led the revitalization of Redhead Ranch end to end: design system, art direction, and the photoshoots themselves. The Product Manager for men’s apparel called inaugural shoot the single best content shoot for their category, a result tied directly to the creative direction I set going into it.
Shot over four days on a working ranch outside Amarillo, TX, with an in-house production crew whose work made the shoot what it was.
THE PASSION PROJECTS
Some of the highest-visibility work didn't come through the normal brand pipeline. It came directly from Johnny Morris, his wife Jeanie, or his daughter Megan, on ventures that mattered to them personally but sat outside what was considered core to Bass Pro Shops: Nature's Superstore (a food store concept championed by Johnny), Natural Reflections (Jeanie's women's apparel brand), and Ozark Mill (an artisanal food and mercantile concept).
Ozark Mill
A restaurant that is a piece of local history, it boasts growing all of it’s ingredients on-site. I explored what that would look like if the ingredients were then packaged and sold in the “general store” located at Ozark Mill.
(Concept, not approved.)
Natural Reflections
Elevated the line's photography through art direction on ongoing work. After being asked to explore where the brand could go, proposed a full rebrand to "Flora & Fibre," developing new naming and visual direction.
(Concept, not approved.)
Nature’s Superstore
Develop the branding for a clean-eating style convenience store that would be incorporated into existing Bass Pro Shops stores.
(Concept, not approved.)
For each, I developed the visual language, then I extended that vision through other teams: partnering with special projects to build out signage suites, and directing the catalog team on how to translate Natural Reflections into their look book. Setting a vision was only half the job. Getting it interpreted consistently by teams I didn't manage was the other half.
THE INFLUENCE
Channel leads, product managers, merchants, marketing managers, and department heads started coming to us directly instead of through the proper channels, based on results and direction. That evolved into something more deliberate: I began advising and coaching other design teams directly, effectively operating as a creative resource across the org rather than within one lane.