Rack Dawg University.

The program

Rack Dawg University was Yakima's national training program for retail accounts — teaching shop staff how to install and sell Yakima products. Done well, RDU events doubled as community-building moments for the brand. Done badly, they were just product training.

What I did

I planned and executed 10+ Rack Dawg University events across the United States — owning logistics, training content, and on-site execution — and served as creative director on a video series highlighting the events and what they delivered. I wrote the concept, set the direction, and partnered with a production team to bring it to life.

Partnerships

Alongside RDU, I built and ran the partnership ecosystem that surrounded Yakima's field marketing work. Each one served a different audience pocket — and together they turned Yakima from a rack brand into a brand that showed up across the outdoor lifestyle.

Auto partnerships

Yakima's partnerships with Subaru (2014–2016) and Toyota (2016–2018) gave me an inside look at how OEM marketing cycles actually work — multiple trips to Detroit, real time inside cross-brand coordination. I worked within these programs, not above them, but what I learned there made the later Ford × Fischer partnership feel natural to step into.

Outdoor and lifestyle partnerships

Field marketing partnerships with Traeger Grills, Dometic, Nokian Tyres, and Scott Bikes — each one chosen because the audience overlap with Yakima's customer was real, not theoretical.

Event partnerships

I got Yakima into some of the best events in the Northeast — NEMBA Fest, Head of the Charles, LOCK'N Festival, On The Water Striper Cup, and DirtRag DirtFest. Mountain bikers, rowers, music fans, anglers, and dirt-bag cyclists. Different crowds, same rack-buying instinct.

Retail promotions

The Buy-a-Cargo-Box-Get-a-Lift-Ticket promo with Cannon Mountain in 2014, expanded to Peak Resorts in 2016 across New England and the Midwest. A small idea that turned a winter accessory into a reason to visit a mountain.

The takeaway

Retail education is one of those programs that's easy to underspend on and easy to overcomplicate. RDU worked because it stayed grounded — real training, real time with retailers, real content that captured why the program mattered. The partnerships worked the same way: real audience overlap, real follow-through, no logos on a deck for the sake of logos.