Indie Record Store Profile: Bull Moose in Maine & New Hampshire
Two years ago, after a regular customer with a collection of 5,000 DVDs died, the man’s sister showed up at the music, movie and book store Bull Moose in Lewiston, Maine, and told employees: “I just don’t know what to do with this, but he loved this place. Can you help me?” They could. Soon they were sifting through the man’s collection, then observing the titles as they filtered through the store and ended up with new buyers.
“We’d have people coming in to see this collection: ‘I saw this on TV once in 1979 and have never seen it since!’” says Renee Clermont, the 11-store chain’s retail operations director. “You get little moments like that every day.”
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The 35-year-old Bull Moose is unique among regional record chains: Instead of dominating one big-city location with a flagship store, its outlets anchor multiple small towns, from Portland, Me. (population 68,000) to Plaistow, N.H. (7,800). “It’s kind of old world,” says Michael Kurtz, Record Store Day’s co-founder. “You get a sense they look out for their neighbors.”
Brett Wickard‘s 2022 decision to sell the company to employees through a stock-ownership plan follows this communal philosophy: “I’m the founder of Bull Moose, but it wasn’t built by me,” he says. “It was built by everybody.”
The South Portland, Maine-based chain, taking advantage of a prolonged vinyl sales boom, including a 4.3% increase in 2024, according to Luminate, is having what Wickard says is its “best year-over-year sales in probably half a decade.” In addition to entertainment media, Bull Moose sells collectible toys, which retail support director Chelsea Berry says are the only products so far that have endured tariff-related price bumps — and those are negligible. “We are seeing some of our vendors having to raise prices quickly. But they may be like, ‘Oh, we’re raising our prices 20%!’” she says. “But it was a $4 item, and it goes to $4.50.”
The stock-ownership plan took employees by surprise when Wickard unveiled it in a 9 p.m. employee meeting. “They announced, ‘Hey, guys, you’re employee-owned now, enjoy.’ We were all in shock, almost,” recalls Alex Smith, who manages the Lewiston store. “It’s a little funky. We’re still figuring out what it means to have it be ours.”
Wickard sold the company to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trust, which vested those who worked at least 1,000 hours per year for two years. It functions like a retirement plan, as opposed to short-term profit-sharing.
“It’s more long-term thinking, which can be tough when you employ younger people who are not thinking about their retirement at all,” Berry says. “Our margins are not that good: If we pay out everything to employees every month, we won’t be able to invest in it.”
Wickard, 56, is a “math and science nerd” who opened the store in 1989 with barely a business plan. He leafed through the Yellow Pages to find a distributor, then ordered one copy of every record. As the store’s popularity grew, Wickard and his staff paid attention to their customers’ buying habits, incorporating them into a high-tech data system. One customer was so attuned to entertainment trends that after he bought anything, “tons” of others wound up buying it a week later, according to Wickard, prompting the company to order multiple copies of whatever the customer purchased. “It wasn’t rocket science,” he says. “That was my big breakthrough.”
Bull Moose endured the CD boom and the Napster-induced crash, then benefitted from the vinyl resurgence. Around 2002, his team began writing software for retail sales and analytics and selling it to other record stores. This business evolved into FieldStack, a 2013 tech company that specializes in retail-management software. The idea was to relieve employees from engaging in “annoying tech s–t,” Wickard says: “Nobody starts a record store saying, ‘I want to fight with networking and computer infrastructure and work on EDI documents,’” he says. “You start a record store because you f–king love music.”
Bull Moose
Maryanne Banks/Bull Moose
Wickard remains the head of FieldStack, which he says is a far less complicated entity to run than Bull Moose’s ESOP plan. “One of the reasons I started FieldStack is to take away [the] complexity retailers deal with. At my core, I hate complexity,” he says. “The ESOP is complex. Fortunately, we had a really good attorney and a group of folks who, all they do is ESOPs.
“Dude,” he adds, “it was so much paperwork.”
In selling to employees, Bull Moose followed a trend among indie music stores. Zia Records, in Arizona and Las Vegas, pulled off a similar ESOP plan in 2021; the Record Exchange in Boise, Idaho sold to a group of longtime employees that same year; the founder of Denver’s Twist & Shout sold to a manager in 2022; and a general manager took over Monster Music in Charleston, S.C., last year. “It was a wave,” Kurtz says. “All those employees who took over the companies all are very passionate about having a record store being a part of the culture.”
Unlike those other stores, though, Bull Moose hasn’t completely abandoned its founder. Wickard has served as interim CEO and chair of the board of directors since the sale, and he’s helping the company search for a permanent CEO. It’s not a traditional CEO position. “Leading Bull Moose means working in the stores, helping stock shelves and working side by side with the team,” he says. “If somebody’s thinking, ‘This is a desk job in a fancy office,’ that’s not for you.”
For now, the company is expanding in tiny ways, including by opening its Lewiston store an hour earlier than usual and closing an hour later — “to be more accessible to the community,” Smith says.
“It’s always been challenging,” Berry adds. “There’s always a new apocalyptic thing that’s threatening the industry. The economy in general. The uncertainty around tariffs. Books are exempt, but paper’s not exempt. Costs are going to go up somewhere.”
Does Bull Moose plan to expand more robustly? Possibly, according to Berry, despite the fact that Bull Moose had to close a flagship store in downtown Portland in 2020 due to an expired lease and low, COVID-era foot traffic. But the chain wouldn’t stray from Maine and New Hampshire. “I don’t see us opening a store in Chicago, or anything like that,” Berry says. “We’ll probably keep it pretty close. Wherever the van can drive to in a day.”
More in this series:
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