How REI's Catalog Voice Became Its Brand Voice

calendar Oct 19, 2026 / · 7 min read · rei brand-voice catalog-history  ·
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A $3.50 Ice Axe and the Storefronts It Beat

In 1934, a University of Washington-trained electrical engineer named Lloyd Anderson went shopping in Seattle for a new ice axe and came away unimpressed by what the going retail price bought him. The Outdoor Store, then the city's main supplier of mountaineering gear, wanted $20 for one. According to notes on Harvey Manning's company history, REI: 50 Years of Climbing Together, Eddie Bauer's own Seattle store charged only slightly less. Anderson turned instead to a new shop that catered mainly to skiers and ordered a $7 axe there. Months later it arrived — a poor-quality Japanese axe — and the shop now wanted $12 for it, not $7.

A Swiss-born climbing friend, Rudy Amsler, had a better idea: order straight from the European magazines that carried ads for outdoor shops abroad. Anderson wrote away for a catalog from a shop in Innsbruck and ordered an Austrian ice axe for $3.50, postage included — a purchase both Manning's account and the University of Washington's Lloyd Anderson papers finding aid place at the start of what became REI. The gap between a $20 storefront axe and a $3.50 mail-order one is the fact that built everything REI's catalogs said about themselves for the next ninety years: cut the middleman, go straight to the source, and tell members exactly why.

A Cooperative, Not a Company

Anderson's climbing friends wanted axes too, and by 1938 he and his wife, Mary Anderson, had enough orders moving through their West Seattle attic to formalize the arrangement. The Andersons and a handful of other climbers founded Recreational Equipment Cooperative — what became REI — on June 23, 1938, according to HistoryLink's company history. Membership cost $1, and new members received sequentially numbered cards; the Andersons held cards No. 1 and No. 2. The model borrowed from the Rochdale Plan, the 1844 English cooperative framework that paid members a dividend on what they'd bought rather than a return on what they'd invested.

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A Dollar to Join, a Dividend to Share

Growth in the first year was modest but real. Membership grew from the founding handful to 82 by the end of 1938, sales totaled $1,361, and the co-op split a $212 surplus among members as its first annual dividend — a benefit HistoryLink's company history calls "coveted." Mary Anderson, who kept working as a school teacher for a while after her wedding, put her German to use writing letters to suppliers in Austria and Switzerland and, according to a tribute quoted in that same account, performed "many roles in the business, from seamstress of product to German translator to 'head of distribution.'" Lloyd had been turning out mimeographed catalogs since 1938. The first designed catalog followed in 1948: Lloyd typed the text and Toly Kojev, a Russian émigré and Cornish School graduate he had met at Seattle Transit, supplied the drawings and cartoons, and the finished pages were mimeographed and sent to members, per HistoryLink's account. REIHistory.com's company timeline describes the same 1948 catalog as hand-typed by Lloyd, with "witty cartoons" by Kojev. By the mid-1950s, HistoryLink adds, REI was said to be the single largest customer of the Seattle post office.

Mary Anderson retired in 1968 and Lloyd in 1970. A year later, per HistoryLink's account, REI had 137,000 members, two stores and a mail-order division, and employed 140 workers.

The Catalog Learns to Talk Like Lloyd and Mary

The voice that catalog spoke in came directly from the people running the business, not from a marketing department — REI didn't have one yet. The Alpenglow Ski Mountaineering History Project's review of REI's own catalog archive, compiled from catalogs held at REI's corporate office, found the co-op's wartime bulletins talking to members in blunt, first-person terms about an economy running short. A January 1942 bulletin, written a month after Pearl Harbor, told members plainly: "We are of the opinion that outing equipment will never see the present prices again," and added, "If you want it this summer it might be safer to buy it now as it may be gone when the mad rush starts." Those lines read like a note from the person watching the stock shelves, passing on what he expected to happen to prices.

The price lists did the same plain work. In 1940 they printed Co-op member prices and regular prices side by side, and by the Alpenglow notes' reckoning ski equipment ran typically 20 to 30 percent cheaper at the Co-op, with climbing equipment 30 to 50 percent off for members. The comparison was the pitch; no adjectives were needed. In 1945 a few pairs of used Army skis were offered at $4.75, with the plain warning that "the army intends to release skis and shoes later to dealers on a fixed price basis."

The same bulletins tracked gear a sentence at a time rather than selling it outright. An October 1940 newsletter, as the Alpenglow notes summarize it, advised against laminated skis because of warping and weak tips, and cautioned that the easier a binding is to adjust, the more likely it is to give trouble with the adjustment. By the late 1960s that plain talk had grown a sense of humor without losing its directness. Manning's company history describes the 1969 winter catalog's pitch for the then-new cross-country "skinny skis": "Between the lines was the message: 'We offer you ESCAPE! Escape from yodeling records and lift lines and lift tickets and waggling fannies and traffic jams. We offer you: The 1930s!'"

From Catalog Voice to Brand Voice

That voice outlived the catalog's original format. According to REIHistory.com, members voted in 1956 to incorporate as a nonprofit, the co-op began 1980 with one million members, and by the mid-2010s it had 145 stores in 35 states — but the register that brand-voice writers point to is still recognizably the one Lloyd and Mary's bulletins used. Copywriter Devon Clements, writing for the marketing agency J.Schmid, picked REI as one of three brands with a genuinely consistent voice across every channel, arguing that whether a customer is talking in-store to someone about "the temperature range of the sleeping bag" or "reading the opening spread of their catalog," they come away "reassured that you are speaking with someone knowledgeable, passionate, someone who actually uses the gear they sell."

That description is close to a plain restatement of what a 1942 bulletin-writer or a 1948 catalog cartoonist was already doing: speaking from direct, personal knowledge of the gear instead of from a script. The co-op's most visible publicity moment worked the same way — REI's first full-time paid employee, Jim Whittaker, became the first American to summit Mount Everest in 1963, and HistoryLink's account credits the climb with bringing the co-op "enormous publicity and a huge spike in sales." The publicity came from an employee doing what the catalog's readers wanted to do, rather than from an ad campaign. A brand voice built on that kind of expertise is slower to invent than a tagline, and harder to copy, which is most of why REI's has carried from mimeographed wartime bulletins through ninety-plus years of catalogs, storefronts, and a website still doing the job the 1948 cartoons did: telling a customer, plainly, what the gear is actually like.

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