By Carolyn Gray Anderson
“I was always the kid with the lemonade stand,” says former U.S. Marine Platoon Sergeant Brian Bishop. At age 12 he wrote to Subway HQ asking for information about buying a franchise and urged his parents to open the first Subway restaurant in their Wyoming town, but they balked at the cost of the investment. Two years later, Bishop analyzed the nascent snowboarding market and determined that with a $6,000 loan he could launch a successful enterprise with 20 boards in a mobile shed — but none of the relatives, friends or passersby he avidly approached wanted to front a 14-year-old any money.
Fast-forward to 2010, when Bishop founded Orion Design Group, an outdoor gear and clothing company he launched with $10,000, which was every bit of his savings. This year, he entered UCLA Anderson’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities to learn to write a business plan so someone might finally invest.
“My business plan is inside my head,” Bishop says. “It comes from knowledge of my industry and a decade as a design consultant. But I felt like my business acumen was getting stretched. I knew that if we’re going to stay competitive in the marketplace, we’re going to have to source capital.”
Not that he hasn’t seen his business grow: Orion caters to adventurous consumers, and as a hunter, climber and combat veteran, Bishop has experienced the kinds of problems Orion solves. “We want to design products that can support all three verticals in our marketplace.”
Orion just launched the Advanced Reconnaissance Chest Rig (ARC), a modular pack designed for both stealth and convenience that has been ordered by U.S. Army Special Forces in California and a Navy SEAL team in Guam. In the middle of EBV on-campus instruction, Orion debuted its first clothing line, the Lupus System, featuring lightweight back-country garments sold through Beyond Clothing, whose tag line is “Stitched in the States.”
“I went straight from an operational career to business,” says Bishop. He has no formal design training but a long career of using the kinds of products he’d like to see improved. “My military experience sparked the design side of my brain. We always modified equipment to do what we needed it to do.” He served for eight years as an active-duty infantry NCO and an additional five as a defense contractor in support of DEA and United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) counter-narcotics/foreign internal defense operations
Post-service, Bishop worked on Smith Optic Elite’s “Inside Every Warrior Is an Athlete” campaign and designed an adaptable weapon light for SureFire. He came very close to selling the Orion brand to a major outdoor clothing company that decided its existing green-leaning audience might not respond to Orion’s edgy concept, “Choose your prey: man, mountain, beast.”
Bishop learned about EBV from 2014 participant Trevor Hill, who founded and is developing Zero Hour Expeditions, a company that leads combat veterans on wilderness adventures. Orion’s “tribe” consists of “a collection of hand-picked mountain athletes” as well as a constellation of companies supporting each other, whether through direct partnerships or simply as kindred spirits in a market they know from every angle. They include Certified Disabled Veteran Owned Companies and those sourcing products, services and manufacturing in the U.S.
“The program has exceeded all my expectations,” says Bishop. “The knowledge I gained here was invaluable. The professors and staff here are incredible and I would highly recommend this program to my peers. To veterans who are planning on starting a small business, I would say this course is a must-have before they begin their venture.”
Good stuff Brian. You're "Tha Man" and you're on to great things. Nice meeting and sharing good space/ideas with you at UCLA my man. Continued Blessings....
Chris Underwood
Posted by: Chris Underwood | 07/17/2015 at 05:18 PM