Outlandish Community Building at New York's Only Black-Owned Outdoor Store

You’ll find Outlandish, one of only three Black-owned outdoor retail shops in the country, wedged between a smoke shop and a bar in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. The store welcomes everyone, whether novice hiker or experienced trail runner, to discover gear from both well-known companies like The North Face and emergent brands from BIPOC designers like Allmansright and Pynrs—among other New York outdoor brands. Plus, the shop hosts a wide range of community events, including Hikeish, a series of guided hikes in collaboration with Salomon, and Trailish, group trail runs supported by Hoka.

Ken Bernard and Benje Williams founded the store with a mission to make the outdoors more accessible for communities of color. Their journey started in 2021 at REI’s flagship store in the Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Williams was shopping for hiking gear when he struck up a conversation with Bernard, then a sales associate. The two kept in contact, and when Williams learned Bernard was interviewing for jobs elsewhere, he pitched Bernard on opening their own shop. “I was like, ‘I think we can make a run at it.’ And he thought we could too,” Williams tells us.

Though they shared a vision for a community hub that would work to make experiencing the outdoors more accessible for people of color, each founder took a different path to jobs in the outdoor industry. Williams was raised in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he’d often hike with his dad. Bernard, who grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, only hiked for the first time in high school.

To make sure they could work well together, Williams moonlighted under Bernard at the footwear department of REI for roughly three months in 2022. By the end of the experience, the pair were locked in and ready to get going on their plans for Outlandish, which opened in January of 2023. In the years since, the store has become a welcome local alternative to big box stores like the one Bernard used to work for, especially as it has become an anti-union machine.

We recently caught up with Bernard and Willams to reflect on two years in business, the response to their Brooklyn outdoor store, plans for the future, and how they connect with the founders of the other two Black-owned outdoor shops in the U.S. (Spoiler: they have a phone call once a month.) An edited version of our conversation is shared below.

How did your first experiences hiking ultimately influence your career trajectory and decision to open Outlandish?

Williams: For me, the absence of nature influenced my career. I was in Pakistan for seven years before founding Understory, a forest restoration startup, in 2020. I did that for two full-time years while moonlighting at REI. I lived in the city of Lahore, which has 12 million people. I know New York is the concrete jungle, but this was just the concrete, concrete. There was hardly any nature around except for these two parks I visited. It was like being removed from access to nature, which caused me to realize how much I missed it and how unbalanced my life felt without that connection.

Bernard: I grew up in a very academic and church-focused home, without folks who knew what nature was. I have family from Texas and Oklahoma, where nature is more like everyday life. Folks weren't trying to embrace that space in the form of hiking; they were farming and just living. In my early adult years, after being exposed to hiking, I didn't love it. I didn't know why people did it as much as they did, but I enjoyed it enough to try it again later. That was crucial.

Over time, I became obsessed with not just the hiking part of it, but with the product part of it. Eventually, I took a part-time role at REI. I enjoyed being around like-minded folks, and applied for a leadership role in the flagship store and got it. I was excited to dive in full-time and to be able to share my newfound joy for nature with those I was meeting. I was getting to outfit both first-time hikers and those hiking since I was born.

You all just celebrated two years of Outlandish being open; what sorts of responses have you all gotten from the community?

Bernard: It's funny, actually. I'm in the physical space every day. I've heard both pretty excellent responses like, Wow, I'm so happy to see this kind of store here in Brooklyn and ones on the other side of the spectrum like, This is a very fancy store, I hope it doesn't make the rent in the neighborhood go up. People also don't expect to see men of color in here. When they walk into the store, they're like, Black people and hiking? Mostly though, folks hear our story, see me, see Benje, and are overjoyed to see us existing, realizing what it takes to keep a small business like this around. Some people tell me outright they don't want to shop anywhere else.

Folks see some representation of themselves in the space; they essentially see stuff from their neighbors. The space was designed by ALA Studio, a New York-based full-service architecture and interior design firm run by two Asian American entrepreneurs. The store feels a part of the community down to the wood used to build it. We bought reclaimed wood for our shelves from Alan at Sawkill Lumber in Crown Heights. The community is the nucleus of our brand and our physical brick-and-mortar space. I think energy is felt, and the space has been well received since we opened.

What do you want people to know about experiencing the outdoors in the Tri-state area?

Williams: I always tell people New York has so much outdoors it's just a little hard to get to. There's twice as much forest coverage in New York as in California. California is 30%, and New York is around 65% percent, so there is a ton of nature. You have to go at least 60 minutes away from the city to get there. We’ve tried to solve this with Hikeish, which provides access to these trails through transportation.

What does Outlandish mean to you?

Williams: We had a short list of names but nothing was hitting. One day, I was reading a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye titled “What’s Here.” It wasn't even about the outdoors. It just had this word “outlandish” in it that touched the garden in me and the soil that had been cultivated for those weeks of brainstorming.

The word broken down means being outside, reconnecting with the land, and not taking ourselves too seriously. Last fall, we wanted to do a hike with my Baptist church in Fort Greene. Everyone was like, We don't hike. That's not our thing. So we called it a nature walk. People were like, Oh, how many miles is it? We let them know it’s 5 or 6. They were like, Oh, that's too much, until we pointed out it's about as many steps as you do every day going to and from the subway. That made them think, Oh, that's easy; I could do that. We tweaked the framing a little bit, and people came out.

How closely knit are you with the other Black-owned outdoor shops?

Williams: We're close. There used to be four of us, but now there are three. The store owner who passed away is Mark Boles; he lived in Hingham, Massachusetts, and had a shop called Intrinsic Provisions. When we were first getting set up, I emailed him, and he wrote back within an hour or less and said, "Let's get on the phone and talk. He was like, We're the second, and you all are about to be the fourth. He was like, You guys are the fourth, and I was like, Sir, we haven't opened yet! We can't claim that number, but he started calling us the fourth even before we became the fourth and, in a way, helped us become the fourth.

He invited us to go up to Massachusetts. I drove up to Hingham, shadowed him for a day, and learned a ton. I heard about his relationship with brands, how he managed inventory, and how he designed the communication and the strategy. He opened up all the books and shared everything with us. While Mark passed away just last year, we keep in contact with the other two Black-owned shop owners, Jahmicah Dawes of Slim Pickins Outfitters and Mandela Echefu of Wheelzup Adventures. It's been squad for sure. We have a call once a month.

Visit Outlandish in Brooklyn and online. Support independent businesses and help build a more accessible outdoor culture for everyone!