For 20 years, Laura and Mike Boers cheerfully sold boots, boat motors, and such to tourists in Three Lakes, Wis. Their rustic little sporting goods store, Northland Marine, gave them a pleasant lifestyle, growing at a steady but modest 5% a year. Then, in 1997, Laura's father, a retired printer, shook things up a bit. He suggested a Web site. "Won't cost you a thing," said Roy Sobolik, now 77. "I'll do all the work."

The result was a simple, unassuming Web site, carefully coded with key words to draw the most traffic from the major search engines. No Shockwave animations here or expensive banner ads to bring in visitors. But it didn't seem to matter. Before they knew it, they were getting orders from Alabama to South Africa to Greenland. Thanks to loyal customers such as Emmanuel Wright, who bought 40 pairs of Sorel boots online for his Antarctica-bound exploration unit of the U.S. Coast Guard in Alabama, Northland's sales doubled to $600,000 last fiscal year, and the Boers's project sales of $1 million this year.

That new business is welcome -- but draining. Last January, their busiest month so far, their five full-time employees worked 12-hour-plus days to fill orders.

While many companies aspire to secure E-commerce transactions on their sites, Northland remains old-fashioned, directing customers to complete the sale with a toll-free call. Laura has learned that she gets fewer returns from her online customers if her phone staff can help them choose the right motor or shoe size.

Now, Laura's biggest problem is keeping the store business healthy while building online sales. She worries that a big competitor could trounce her on the Web. "I don't want to lose what we have worked so hard for here in Three Lakes. My safety valve is our local customers, who know who and where we are."

So she balances her inventory to meet the disparate demands of both groups of customers -- plenty of Ryka water shoes for the Web but swimwear for the store.

Laura has set aside $6,800 for two new computers this year, and they've recently added a toll-free phone line. Still, little Northland has one leg up on the big guys when it comes to costs. The work done by her Webmaster/dad is entirely free -- and priceless.

By Victoria Houston

This article was originally published in the May 24, 1999 print edition of Business Week's frontier. To subscribe, please see our subscription policy.

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