Trailheads

Angela Salido built Outside In around a straightforward premise: outdoor clothing should work for everything— the trail, the town, the trip — without making customers choose.

Salido, Outside In’s founder and owner, has been in the outdoor industry since she was 15 years old. First working at an indoor skate park, then a snowboard surf skate shop, then years in development and marketing before she found her way back to retail. She’s a surfer, a backpacker, a cyclist, yogi, and a snowboarder. She’s not one kind of outdoor person. That’s the ethos she brought to building her retail location in the heart of downtown Bend, OR.

The store carries apparel, footwear, and lifestyle gear selected for people who move between the mountains and the city on the same day — and want to look good doing both. Not hyper-technical, not trend-chasing. Something in between, chosen with intention.

“I really wanted to create a store where you could buy clothes to do all of those things,” Salido says, “but it wasn’t so gear-heavy and so techie-heavy that you spend $1,000 on this one outfit that was just for this thing.”

The question she asks when building Outside In’s highly curated shop floor: how can this product cross over? How does it fit into daily life, into travel, into a multi-sport day? And underneath all of that — does it hold up, is it made well, and does the brand behind it actually care about the environment?

Salido does all the product selection herself. No catalog orders placed sight unseen. She touches everything, tries everything, looks at everything before it goes on the floor. The result is a tight and thoughtfully curated assortment — maybe five puffy jackets, as an example — where every option was put there on purpose.

“My customers have come to trust Outside In and know that we have done the work for them,” Salido says.

That trust is the store’s core asset. It’s also what makes the current retail climate feel particularly high-stakes. Salido is candid about the pressure. Something has shifted in consumer behavior — customers standing in the store, holding a product they want to buy, putting it down and ordering it online before they leave. It’s not just a lost sale. It’s a signal that the case for independent retail must be made, and remade, constantly.

“I feel like people still care, but I feel like they’ve almost forgotten,” she says. “My own friends will be like, ‘Oh, I got that on Amazon.’ And I’m like, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?'”

Salido sits on the board of the Downtown Bend Business Association because of this. It’s a tangible expression of a belief she carries into work every day — if customers drift toward online, what does a main street look like in five years? Every town becomes a different version of the same mall.

The response for Salido isn’t to pull back. It’s to go deeper on what independent retail actually does. The footwear category is the clearest example. Staff training at Outside In is a real investment: understanding foot shape, foot issues, and how both affect which shoe works for each customer in every situation. She invests in training for nuanced sales like the classic Bend customer conundrum — a person who is heading to Spain, will be hiking and city-walking, and needs just one pair of shoes to do it all . Even a request this challenging gets a real answer from her highly trained staff.

“That is easier than buying five pairs and returning them all online,” she says.

It costs money to train staff that way and requires real strategy. Salido treats it as an investment, not overhead. The bet is that customers recognize the difference between a transaction and an actual conversation about their feet and the right footwear to better serve them. This creates better experiences outdoors, built-in trust and incentive to return to her store for a customer’s next purchase.

Outside In has been in its current building in downtown Bend for nearly ten years — a space that started as a small outdoor lifestyle section inside the nearby running store, Footzone Bend, before growing into its own shop. Salido was there from nearly the start, helped build what Outside In became, and eventually bought it.

The last decade included COVID, the post-pandemic buying surge, the hangover from that surge, and now tariffs and a cautious consumer. Salido describes the last five years as genuinely inconsistent. What’s kept her grounded isn’t a growth strategy. It’s the things she actually cares about: community, product, the people on her team, and the outdoor spaces that make Bend worth living in.

“If the world changes and there’s just no more space for specialty retail,” she says, “this has still served a huge purpose for me in my life.”

That’s not defeat. It’s the kind of clarity that comes from running something you believe in through some genuinely hard years. Outside In is still here, still curating, still training staff on foot shape and the footwear that will best serve their customers shopping for their next adventure. Salido is investing in people right now and in faith that summer will show up and inspire people to get outdoors. Salido is determined to restore value for in-person experiences and the little joys that come from staff talking gear and adventure with customers on the shop floor.

“As long as I keep just doing what I believe in,” she says, “It’ll all work out.”

Outside In is located in downtown Bend, Oregon. Learn more at outsideinbend.com.