Imagine your class deciding to buy one big set of pencils for everyone, with each student contributing a little money. You also decide together which pencils to buy—and if the store earns more money than it needs, you get part of it back. Sounds fair, right? Almost a century ago, people who had come to Seattle from a distant, cold country—Finland—brought exactly this idea to the city. Thanks to that idea, one of America’s best-loved outdoor-gear stores exists today.
People from the Other Side of the World
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, thousands of Finns boarded large ships and crossed the ocean in search of a new life. Many settled in the American Northwest, in Washington State, where the city of Seattle is located today. Life in their new home was not easy: jobs were scarce, and money was even scarcer.
But the Finnish settlers had brought one wonderful habit from home: they knew how to work together. Instead of each family trying to open its own small shop, they pooled their money and opened a shared store. Everyone who invested became a co-owner. Together, they decided what to sell. And if the store made a profit, it was divided fairly among all the participants.
Stores like these are called cooperatives. The word may sound complicated, but the idea is simple: “Let’s own this together and look after one another.”
From the Mountains to the Store: A Mountaineers’ Story
Several decades passed. In 1938, a group of mountaineering friends in Seattle faced a problem: they needed sturdy ice axes for climbing in the mountains, but it was almost impossible to buy good equipment in America. One of them, Lloyd Anderson, even ordered an ice axe from Austria.
The friends thought: What if we did what the settlers had done years earlier? What if we joined together and created a store owned by the customers themselves?
That was how REI—Recreational Equipment, Inc.—was born. Anyone who paid a small fee became a co-owner of the store. Once a year, the company calculated its profits and returned part of the money to everyone who bought from it.
“We simply wanted mountaineers to have good equipment at a fair price,” Lloyd Anderson later said about why they started it all.
Why It Matters for Mountains and Forests
The most interesting thing is that the cooperative idea turned out to be useful not only for shoppers’ wallets, but also for nature. When a store is owned by millions of ordinary people—hikers, mountaineers, and lovers of forests and mountains—it becomes harder for the company to forget what it is really meant to do: protect nature, not just make money.
Today, REI has millions of co-owners across America. The company donates money to protect parks, forests, and trails, organizes cleanups in the mountains, and teaches children to love nature. All of this grew from a simple idea that ordinary people once carried across the ocean on a large ship—people who simply dreamed of surviving and helping one another.
A Small Idea, a Big Impact
That is how the simple habit of “sharing and making decisions together,” kept by Finnish settlers like a family secret, grew decades later into a huge store loved by millions of outdoor enthusiasts. This story reminds us that you do not have to be rich or famous to make the world a better place. Sometimes all it takes is a good idea and a desire to care for one another—and then the idea will find its own way, even if it has to cross an entire ocean.
