DRAPER — When Mike Pratt, founder and majority owner of OGIO, Utah’s internationally renowned bag company, realized they needed to find a bigger building because they had outgrown their office space — again — he was all smiles.
And not just because prosperity was causing the move.
Because he’d get to design the new building.
For Pratt, who started OGIO almost 30 years ago because his gym bag wouldn’t fit in a locker the way he wanted, moving wasn’t a hassle, it was a chance for him to indulge his obsession.
“I just love design,” he says. “It’s what I think about all the time. I tell people, make sure you’re doing in life what you think about all the time and you’ll be happier. I couldn’t be an accountant because there’s no way on my off time I’d be thinking about that stuff. But designing something, a bag, a shoe, an office, it’s what I think about. Constantly.”
Then he laughs, “I am a sick person, just ask my wife.”
Sick in a very productive, satisfying way. What Pratt’s mind has created qualifies as one of Utah’s greatest business success stories. In 1986, he and Jana, the aforementioned wife, were surviving on her paycheck from the phone company and Rice-a-Roni, while Mike was downstairs tinkering with designs.
He’d already turned heads as a teenager with a plastic cup-holder he designed that could fit on car dashboards. He got a company in Hong Kong to make them and sold the rights to a company in the Eastern U.S. But after all that he barely broke even on the deal. He was ahead of his time. A couple of years later, cup-holders became standard fare on cars.
Undaunted, his mind kept thinking and he kept designing. He went to the gym one day to work out and couldn’t fit the duffle bag carrying his gear in the locker without tipping the bag on end. Hmmm. What if his duffle bag was a locker shaped bag?
He went home, found a cardboard box, and made a prototype for a locker bag, with compartments for soap, shampoo, sweaty clothes, deodorant. To make a long and happy story short, he took that cardboard box to Asia, had 4,000 of them made in South Korea, and he’s been making and selling them ever since — along with dozens of other bags, from briefcases to backpacks to golf bags to you name it.
In 1989, the company’s second year in business, they did $8.4 million in sales. Last year, they did nearly $150 million. OGIO (the name doesn’t stand for anything; Mike and Jana thought it up and liked the sound of it) is the top seller in the world of golf bags and power sports bags (motocross racers, etc.).
And they just keep growing — at a rate of 25 percent a year ever since the economy righted itself and people started buying bags again.
Which brings us back to the new building.
After searching the Salt Lake Valley for the right spot, Mike settled on a warehouse just west of the I-15 freeway and north of the Utah State Prison. A big new empty shell of a building. It was perfect.
Like a giant with supersized Legos he got busy. He designed every nook and cranny of OGIO’s new 28,000 square feet: The high ceilings. The angled hallway that lines up with a big red OGIO logo at the opposite end. The aluminum glass garage door going into the showroom. The custom steel I-beam desks (nobody’s going to walk away with those). The cage feel to the workout room/play room. The modern kitchens. The non-cube cubicles for the designers and marketers.
“I micromanaged every square foot,” says Mike proudly.
Including the bathrooms.
Mike loves bathroom design. “Whenever I go to a nice restaurant, I go to the bathroom to see what it looks like, ’cause they’re always pretty cool,” he says. “I take pictures.
“Like I say, my wife thinks I’m sick.”
OGIO’s bathrooms are white marble (women’s) and gray marble (men’s) and “pretty cool.”
The company’s 65 employees moved into their spacious new one-of-a-kind headquarters a month ago, to rave reviews. That leaves Mike, who turned over management of the company to CEO Tony Palma six years ago — “he’s 10 times the CEO I am,” says Mike — with new things to think about.
Sitting at his custom-made I-beam desk in his custom warehouse office, he acknowledges that his mind is of course working on something new. And he’ll let you know what it is. As soon as it goes on sale.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays. Email: benson@deseretnews.com