Amy Beck
President, Oboz Footwear
The Basics
Company Name: Oboz Footwear
Location: Bozeman, MT
Founded: 2007
Full-Time Employees: 26
Products: Shoes and boots
Social: Instagram // Facebook // Twitter // LinkedIn
Claim to Fame: We’ve planted a tree for every pair sold since we started. Plus, our HQ within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem provides an awesome testing ground.
The Culture
The best thing about working at OBOZ is:
the people. The kindest, hardest working, and most humble folks. Our values are based on the word TRUE—being true to our people, our community, the experience, and finally, true to the foot. While we strive to succeed in business, it is not at the expense of promoting the soulful life we all pursue. We have a team of passionate people that want to provide a high level of service to our consumers so they can get out and make their experience in the outdoors better. We are committed to supporting our team both personally and professionally and inspire them to live their best lives.
When we’re not working, we’re:
on our trails! Hiking, biking, skiing at Bridger Bowl or in the backcountry, rafting on the Madison, Gallatin and Yellowstone rivers. Still discovering all the vast wilderness and open space around us.
What we’re reading:
During COVID our team has been sharing articles weekly around innovation in the workplace, change management and how to build stronger teams. We are committed to starting a book club to educate ourselves on Black Lives. We purchased for all employee to read How to be an Anti-Racist, White Fragility, and The New Jim Crow.
What we’re listening to:
we are listening to our Bozeman community, we are listening to influencers in our space, we are listening to our team who is asking us for direction and giving us direction through their personal experiences. We are listening to voices that can guide us to education and action.
We’re also closely following these accounts:
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
The NeverEnding Trail
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
The outdoors are awe-inspiring, healing, motivating, and sacred. Everyone should be able to experience the outdoors with no fear, no judgement or hatred. The outdoors belong to everyone and should be accessible to anyone who wants to experience them. We want to represent all groups who get out on trails, and encourage more people to get out on trails. This matters to us more than selling shoes. If more people are not comfortable in the outdoors and the outdoors are not safe for all, everything that we aspire to be as a company is for not.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
We have evolved as a nation and as an industry, and we have seen movement toward a world where racism is eradicated, and equality is not the exception but the norm. It is our hope that we all hold each other accountable to being anti-racist. We, as an organization, hope to work with our community to bring more diversity to our team and draw diversity to our town. We will work to increase the representation of BIPOC within Oboz, and help Bozeman draw in more diverse groups from beyond Montana’s borders.