Gregg Angier
Husband/Father/GM, QALO
The Culture
Demographics (Optional):
57% Male and 43% Female. 74% White, 17% Asian-American, 9% Latino
The best thing about working at QALO is:
belonging to a community of people who share a love of exploring, are curious about the world and always try to do their best.When we’re not working, we’re:
When We’re not working, we’re:
Working out, hiking, camping, surfing, running, and eating In-N-Out!
What we’re reading:
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, Stories I’d Tell in Bars by Jen Lancaster, Range by David Epstein
What we’re listening to:
Mumford and Sons, Daft Punk, Grateful Dead, Kenny Chesney
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
“Never Settle”
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
The outdoors is ingrained into our DNA - it’s the “O” in QALO (Quality, Athletics, Love and Outdoors). We love the feeling of being connected to nature and the people you share those experiences with. These are things that everyone should have and be encouraged to have. The outdoors belongs to all of us equally but we’ve been made to believe that it’s something for straight white people or that only straight white people enjoy. Just looking at our community we know this isn’t the case. We want to better serve everyone by being more inclusive and representative.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
We have grown the QALO community to be more inclusive of black people, the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities.
Our dialogue with this broader community results in better understanding between groups and our social platform becomes a space where people share ideas because they feel represented and understood.
By listening to these ideas we create products and experiences that better serve a broad cross-section of society.
In doing so we attract more diverse people into the outdoor space and to our business.
Ultimately we want to be able to use the story of our journey to inspire others to do the same, not only other outdoors businesses by all kinds of organizations and white members of our community. We really don’t feel in a position to tell anyone else what to do right now. Where we want to get to is a place where we can say, “this was not an easy thing for us to face and it’s been a long journey but it is 100% possible and 100% worth it.”