An Outdoors Legend Leaves Town, Sort Of

Next time you’re setting up your easy-assemble dome tent in the dark on a hasty weekend camping trip, give a nod to Skip Yowell, Murray Pletz and Jan Lewis.

Likewise, you could send a little thanks to the trio as you help your kid load her sturdy JanSport backpack in the morning, remembering that, if it ever breaks, you can send it back for a replacement.  

Lewis is the “Jan” in JanSport; Pletz is the man behind the company’s early outdoor gear designs; and Yowell is the company’s recently retired co-founder and former vice president of global public relations. Make that semi-retired.

Yowell has been with the San Leandro-based company since its beginning 43 years ago. Though he announced his retirement at the end of December, he can’t quite make the split.

When I met Yowell in January in his office at JanSport’s headquarters on Farallon Drive, he was getting ready for a trade show in Salt Lake City, Utah, followed by another show in Germany, and then a trip to Indonesia—all to promote the company he just retired from.

“I still love the business,” said Yowell, who has spiky, dirty-blond hair and blue eyes, and wore a turquoise and black beaded surfer necklace at the interview. “I love the people. I love the products.”

A long-time outdoor enthusiast, Yowell, who’s 64, said he would continue to test out new products and help develop prototypes. He also plans to stay involved in the company’s charitable activities and environmental activism.

“I get to do all the fun things that I enjoy doing,” Yowell said.

Looking around Yowell’s memento-cluttered office, it’s obvious the man has thoroughly enjoyed his chosen career.

Here’s a photo of three young founders, Yowell, Pletz and Lewis, dressed up in old Western attire, taken on one of their trips through the West. Here’s another of an 1989 Kangchenjunga expedition team. A pair of old wooden skis leans against one corner of his office, while a pile of backpacks fills another. 

The corporate ladder has clearly been more thrill than grind.

JanSport, which is owned by VF Corporation, has been located in San Leandro since 2005. VF Corporation plans to  including JanSport and The North Face, to Alameda later this year.

Though Yowell will continue to make visits to the home office, he and his wife, Winnie, moved out of their Pleasanton home in January and headed back to Kansas, where both of them grew up.

Yowell’s career history, and the history of JanSport, is a guidebook for turning passion into profit. In fact, Yowell did turn his story into a book, The Hippie Guide to Climbing the Corporate Ladder & Other Mountains.

Yowell spent vacations during junior high school exploring the outdoors in the Pacific Northwest with his cousin, Pletz, and his cousin’s family. During college, Yowell spent a summer working at a gas station in a Colorado mountain town and climbing peaks in his spare time.

One day in 1967, he got a phone call from Pletz. It would turn out to be the beginning of the rest of Yowell's charmed life.

Pletz had won a design contest with an adjustable aluminum frame backpack that was lighter and more versatile than most packs of the day. He and his girlfriend, Lewis, decided to combine their skills—his in engineering and design, hers in sewing—to start producing the packs for sale.

But they needed a marketing guy. That’s when Yowell got the call.

“You never know, one little thing can really twist your fate,” Yowell said.

The threesome spent the next 15 years building up JanSport up from a family operation based in Pletz’s father’s transmission shop, to one of the world’s most well-respected outdoor gear companies.

Though now best known for its ubiquitous school backpacks, JanSport claims to have pioneered the dome tent, the convertible luggage-traveler’s pack, and even the doggie pack—now all the rage, but ahead of its time in the early 1970s. (JanSport stopped making the dog packs after selling just around 100 of them, Yowell recounts in his book.)

All the while, Yowell, Pletz and Lewis backpacked, camped and climbed mountains throughout the West and, while they were at it, tested their gear. 

Yowell went on to climb two of the world’s famed peaks, Everest and Kangchenjunga, both in the Himalayas. He has climbed Washington’s 14,411-foot Mt. Rainier 21 times, he said.

When Yowell retired in December, he was the last of the founding trio still with JanSport. Pletz left the company in 1982 to pursue other interests, according to Yowell, while Lewis retired six years ago.

JanSport has come a very long way from its humble, hippie, high tech beginnings. The company was purchased in 1986 by VF Corporation, which now also owns The North Face, Eagle Creek, Vans, Wrangler and 20 other top clothing and outdoor gear brands.

The bulk of JanSport’s business now comes from daypacks, book bags and laptop totes rather than extreme outdoor gear. Kids now trudge to school lugging JanSport book bags in 52 countries.  

I asked Yowell if he ever caught flak from his hippie friends for helping turn the family business into a multinational corporation. He smiled but seemed a tad offended. 

“We’ve been very active in the sense of giving back,” he said. Yowell said the company contributes time and resources to nonprofit organizations, donates products to schools, and is environmentally conscious. Plus, he noted, JanSport employs a lot of people.

“I think in a lot of ways, if we were not a good company with good values, people would look at us a lot differently,” Yowell said.

As evidence of the company’s focus on environmental sustainability, he pointed to the new corporate campus VF Corporation is building in Alameda to house JanSport, The North Face and the company's other outdoor brands.

One of Yowell’s favorite civic roles is his involvement with Big City Mountaineers, an organization that takes troubled and disadvantaged youth on wilderness trips. Yowell sits on the board of directors and takes at-risk teens on eight-day canoe trips every summer through the Boundary Waters of northeastern Minnesota. JanSport raises funds for the program and donates gear.

The Oakland chapter of Big City Mountaineers takes kids on summer backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada range.

Yowell plans to stay involved in the business’s charitable activities. He also plans to spend a lot more time with his family—he traveled 135 days last year for Jansport, he said—and doing the things he loves to do, which, not surprisingly, “is mostly outdoors,” he said.

Yowell said he loves to fly fish, trek and explore new lands. He has at least two trips planned this year: a cruise from Alaska to Vancouver, and a trek to Machu Picchu in Peru.

In between, you'll probably find him casting along a river, hiking a peak, or peddling backpacks somewhere in the world.