How Overland turned small-town tourism into sales

On a crisp January morning, Roger Leahy is soaking up the Florida sunshine while talking shop over Zoom.

The co-owner of luxury sheepskin and outerwear brand Overland has reason to relax. The family business, founded by Leahy’s parents in New Mexico in 1973, recently expanded its retail footprint by 21%, adding four new stores over the past year.

While e-commerce accounts for roughly half of Overland’s sales, the brand has been quietly and deliberately growing its brick-and-mortar presence across the US. New locations in Traverse City, Michigan; Chagrin Falls, Ohio; Lake Placid, New York; and Rapid City, South Dakota, have opened in just the last few months. Still, Leahy insists he’s a “small-town” guy and has little interest in planting flags in major metro areas.

Instead, Overland’s stores tend to show up in vacation destinations like Aspen, Colorado; Napa, California; and Santa Fe, New Mexico, (its most successful location to date.) According to Leahy, the brand’s sweet spot is consumers discovering—or rediscovering—Overland while traveling.

“We do have some demographic software that can help track the traffic and visitors…but we’re basically picking stores just in towns that we think are really towns that represent our brand well,” Leahy told Retail Brew.

So far, the strategy appears to be paying off. Overland has posted double-digit growth every year since 2020 and plans to open additional stores in 2026.

In an exclusive chat with Retail Brew, Leahy explained why the brand continues to resonate with customers and why it remains intentionally frugal even as it scales.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Who is your prime consumer base?

We cater to tourism. Even when we were in Taos where we started, it was the Texans vacationing up in Taos that came up and bought our coats. It wasn’t the people that lived in Taos. So we’ve always catered to entertainment tourism. We like to make our stores a real fun and inviting place. We stay open late at night, like in Santa Fe. We’re on the plaza, and we may be one of the only retailers that stays open until 9 o’clock at night. People are out walking from their restaurant back to their hotel, and they come into Overland and have a fun time looking around and visiting with our people.

What are Overland’s principles of success?

You have to have your door open. In most weather, we actually leave our doors open, too. There was a new employee that was out in her Truckee, California, store. She called up, and said, “Roger, I know you like the doors open, but it’s 55 degrees in the store right now. Is it okay if I close the doors?” I said, “Of course; that’s just a guideline.” But we also invite our staff to wear our coats to keep warm while they’re selling them.

That’s one of the secrets of retail, too: You want people to try on the product. Once you have a sheepskin coat on, you feel how supple and luxurious and cozy and stylish—everything that it is. You don’t really want to put it down.

My mom found that that was her thing. When she was selling in our store in Omaha, someone would walk in the door and she would peg them for what coat would look best on them and fit them the best. She would get them and say, “I’d like to see how this looks on you. Would you please try it on?” And they would try it on. So that’s really what we find successful in retail is having your doors open, being inviting, welcoming people in, and then getting them to enjoy trying on coats.

Why is it important for Overland to be frugal in its operations?

In an ideal world, I would be expanding entirely on our retained earnings, not on borrowed money from the bank. We have a good relationship with our bank, but we don’t go into big, operative, expensive places, because we’re more frugal.

My parents were both very frugal, and we just have that sensibility. We just like to expand when it’s easy for us and when we have the funds to comfortably do it in the inventory and so forth. It’s really good right now. That’s why we’re able to open four stores this last year, and we only did it when it wasn’t a strain. Our expansion to retail has just been our choice. We could have been just as successful online, probably, if we didn’t have 23 stores now. But the momentum is toward expansion just because the market seems to be really wanting what we’re providing, and so we’re doing our best to keep it going.