Bear Grylls, Savage Ventures To Acquire, Expand Outdoors.com

TV star and writer Bear Grylls is partnering with Nashville-based digital-sector investors Savage Ventures to acquire, build out and relaunch the venerable website Outdoors.com, and turn it into an adventure-travel destination site.

The partners said they plan to make Outdoors.com “the home of adventure, with exclusive news, content, commerce, engaging community-based initiatives, newsletters and message forums and expert guidance on the best outdoor gear to buy.” A “revamped phase one” of the site launched today.

“The goal of Outdoors is to be the ultimate destination for everything adventure and out in the wild,” said Grylls in an email interview. “Whether it’s planning your next adventure holiday, figuring out which tent is best for your trip, getting tips and advice on travel, locations, expeditions or simply tuning in and listening to some inspirational stories and behind-the-scenes experiences from our experts. We are here to empower, equip and inspire. To be the ultimate trusted home of adventure. Making the outdoors fun, accessible and geared for you.”

Savage Ventures partners Sam Savage and David Webb said in an email interview the acquisition is about “building a holistic media company that will provide incredible content in whatever format and wherever the consumer wants to engage with it. The ability to acquire an exact-match dot.com to serve as the hub for the content and harness powerful first-party data was icing on the cake.”

Grylls has been a producer, writer and on-camera star in a series of TV shows over the past dozen years, including Man Vs. Wild, Running with Bear Grylls, and You Vs. Wild, for Discovery, Netflix, and Disney’s National Geographic. The interactive Netflix show You Vs. Wild has won two Emmys.

“I’m going to be continuing to make my TV shows for Nat Geo and the other networks I work with, but we will definitely be creating a whole host of cool content that is exclusively for Outdoors,” Grylls said. “That’s going to be a fun mission and the key is bringing in the best-in-class adventurers to share this with. I’m also incredibly proud that everything we do will in turn be supporting various environmental charities and wildlife endeavours to help protect our planet.”

In building out the site, Grylls said he would be involved “across it all! From the values, to the content, to the deals and opportunities. In terms of my focus, this is it. Everything I do will have the aim of being directed through Outdoors.com.”

Outdoors.com will also feature behind-the-scenes access to various Grylls adventures around the world, product reviews, immersive editorial features, and e-commerce offerings.

A premium membership program called Outdoors+ will give subscribers deeper access, with exclusive merchandise, Q&A sessions with Grylls, in-person gatherings, and free outdoors guides. A portion of net proceeds from Outdoors+ will be donated to the World Lands Trust, the partners said.

“I have seen first hand being outdoors helps us reconnect with those we love and each other as well as healing and challenging us as individuals,” Grylls said. “In short, I believe we have never needed the outdoors more and we want to bring it to you.”

Savage Ventures has previously invested in a range of digital media assets, but said the deal fills a hole in their holdings.

“We also like non-correlated bets, and the outdoors category is underserved in our portfolio as well as the broader market,” Savage and Webb said. “Obviously, with an iconic personality like Bear, we are going to lean in as much as possible, but Bear has an amazing network of friends and fellow adventures that we will be scaling content around. We want to create the world’s largest community focused on outdoors and expect there to be breadth and depth to the content voice.”

Savage Ventures sold its sports-media company Outback to Fox last year. It owns music publication American Songwriter, a video-production and creative-services unit called Savage Media, a sports betting unit called Savage Sports, and DTC healthcare brand MyDrHank.