No two Bass Pro Shops stores are alike. Each takes its cue from the surrounding environment, incorporating elements from local flora and fauna. Achieving the distinctions that create these retail monuments to the great outdoors is no easy feat. Design details give each store its signature location-specific appeal, so it’s those details Bass Pro’s inhouse designers and fabricators concentrate on.

To do this, they need fixture manufacturers they can trust to handle the core of their stores—the framework, so to speak, on which to hang the intricate little touches that make each store a tourist destination as well as an outdoorsy backdrop for merchandise. For behind every successful creative store environment are solidly functional fixtures. Enter NASFM members.

For its 16th Bass Pro retail location—World Wide Sportsman in Destin Commons, an open-air town center in what has been dubbed “The World’s Luckiest Fishing Village” in the Florida Panhandle—Bass Pro turned to three NASFM members for many of its fixturing needs. Lozier Corp. built gondolas and shelving, Reeve Store Equipment Co. supplied rounders, four-ways, two-ways, and hardware, and Rocky Creek Ltd. provided specialty fixtures.

Their ability to generate exactly what Bass Pro needed with consistent quality laid the groundwork for the store interior. The retailer has turned to some of these members repeatedly as it has added new stores. Monica R. Matthias, interior project manager for Bass Pro, cites their reliability.

Lozier, for instance, has served as Bass Pro’s primary gondola fabricator for several years. “They are a wonderfully reliable vendor that produces a high-quality product,” Matthias says. “In addition, Lozier has always been very responsive to change, managing information and coordinating shipping deadlines. They take the direction created from our highly innovative and unique store designs and make the process of receiving the gondola at the job site very accurate and efficient.”

Lozier custom finishes the gondolas for Bass Pro. The Destin store features black metal with wild cherry laminate. Bass Pro’s in-house fabrication shop trimmed the gondolas with wood that varied by department.

Reeve also provided custom finishes for its fixtures and hardware that were unique to the Destin store, including raw clear powdercoating and penny vein powdercoating. “Their product was good, and their response to our needs on this project was very satisfactory,” Matthias says.

Rocky Creek, whose fixtures for the store included shoe risers, clothing racks, tables, and T-shirt racks, customized its work as well. For instance, local fish species, researched by Rocky Creek, were incorporated into the metal scenes for many of the metal form bases and shoe risers. “Rocky Creek is one of the most imaginative, responsive, and dynamic fixture companies in existence. They have a true artisan craftsmanship base combined with the ability to meet intense deadlines and budgetary needs. They are truly a design-to-implementation company,” Matthias says.

Leaving the manufacture of many fixturing items to these store fixture professionals freed Bass Pro’s in-house team to get creative with brand-supporting design details such as a stone crab sculpture in metal railing or a gate bar carved into the shape of a bear claw. Their design sense resulted in a store directory and cashwraps shaped like boats and an elevator to the upper level resembling what Floridians commonly refer to as a “tuna tower,” a sort of modern-day crow’s nest placed on a fishing boat to afford an angle from which to spot fish.

Despite the overall awe-inspiring result, the project was more or less a cakewalk for these NASFM members. That’s because building high-quality custom fixtures that accommodate the needs of creative designers is simply what they do on an everyday basis.

Teaming in-house experts with fixture professionals helped Bass Pro reel in a Grand Prize and a Fixture Grouping Award in NASFM’s 2004 Retail Design competition. The retailer has been busy since the July 17 opening of the Destin store, currently boasting 23 locations with several more set to open this year and yet more planned for 2005 and 2006. Given Bass Pro’s experience with this project and prior stores, it seems likely that each will sport fixtures built by NASFM members.