Casting a wider net: massive outdoor-gear stores fish for more Tar Heel trade, forcing smaller rivals to try new lures.

• Author: Anderson, Pete M.
• Position: Statewide: BUSINESS NEWS FROM ACROSS NORTH CAROLINA

Grabbing the rope hand over hand, the bearded man in camouflage clothes pulled his crossbow to where he sat at the top of a tall tripod deer stand. He drew its string and loaded an arrow. The man shook slightly as he took aim, pausing to look at the target before returning the stock to his cheek. He pulled the trigger, and the arrow hit the target dead center. His quarry wasn't a big-game animal deep in a forest. It was a grand-opening ribbon stretched across foam targets stacked in front of the 104,000-square-foot Cabela's Inc. store in the Charlotte suburb of Fort Mill, S.C.

It's the first of 13 stores the Sidney, Neb.-based outdoor-gear retailer will open this year, including one of similar size in Garner. The company expects to keep expanding across North America at that pace for the next three to five years, which seems counterintuitive for a business that began with a classified ad for mail-order, hand-tied fishing flies in 1961. By 2013, Cabela's had revenue of $3.6 billion, mostly from catalog and Internet sales. But it is part of a wave of outdoor-gear retailers aiming at North Carolina. Privately held Springfield, Mo.-based BPS Direct LLC, for example, opened a 105,000-square-foot Bass Pro Shops store in Cary in 2014 to complement its 150,000-square-foot store near Charlotte. St. Paul, Minn.-based Gander Mountain Co. has nine stores here. Its Internet and catalog operations in Greenville also support Overton's, a water-sports focused subsidiary based there that the company bought in 2007 for about $70 million. They and others are stalking the 3.5 million Tar Heels who spent $3.3 billion--$1.4 billion for equipment alone--to hunt, fish or watch wildlife, according to a 2011 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study. Their numbers are growing, along with the options of places to buy the latest gear. Of 12 major outdoor-gear retailers in the state, eight opened in the last three years.

Cabela's builds its stores--which numbered 65 in mid-April--where most of its catalog and Internet sales originate. With its mountains, rivers, lakes and coast, North Carolina is at the top of that list. (The Fort Mill store is next to Interstate 77, half a mile from the state line and 12 miles from downtown Charlotte.) The pool of potential Tar Heel customers is stocked. In fiscal 2013,13.9 million people visited the 74 sites in the state-parks system. From 2004 to 2014, when the state's population grew 17% to almost 10 million, the number of inland...