File Photo / Tim Greenway
Brett Wickard
Updated: 30 min ago
Bull Moose founder returns as retailer's interim CEO
Photo / RENEE CORDES
Bull Moose is an employee-owned retailer with eight locations in Maine (out of 11 total), including this store at 219 Waterman Dr. in South Portland.
Two and a half years after stepping down as CEO of Bull Moose, founder Brett Wickard is back at the helm in an interim role as the Portland-based entertainment retailer seeks its next leader.
Wickard founded the company in 1989 while still a student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick and sold it to employees in early 2022 via an employee stock ownership plan.
“It’s actually super fun to now be working for the employees,” Wickard told Mainebiz in a Wednesday phone interview.
Wickard plans to serve in the interim role until the company finds a successor for Shawn Nichols, who resigned after his wife landed her dream job in a location too far away for him to stay on with Bull Moose.
Bull Moose, a purveyor of music, books, movies and games, has 11 total locations, including eight in Maine. Out of 110 employees based in the Pine Tree State, around 80 are also owners.
Wickard said the interim CEO role aligns with his leadership of FieldStack, a Portland software company he founded in 2013 that supplies data and analytics to retail clients.
“They’re quite parallel roles,” said Wickard. “I’m thinking about retail and forecasting 24/7. I’m putting in a ton of hours but it’s a fun ton of hours.”
Wickard also said that while he hopes to find Bull Moose’s next CEO by the end of January, he plans to take the time to find the right person for the job without a specific deadline.
“I always believe in all positions,” he said. “It’s a match to be made, not a prize to be won.”
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, Wickard said that business is going well starting with a double-digit increase in Black Friday sales over last year.
The company has also expanded its inventory to product lines well beyond music and movies to trading cards and strategy-themed board games like “Catan,” which he describes as a resource competition game. He says the games appeal to a wide demographic.
“Coming out of COVID, we’re all better together when we find ways to genuinely connect,” just like he did via music.
“I was always a math nerd growing up, and music was the way I could connect with other people,” he said. “Almost everything we do [at Bull Moose] is about that and finding common ground. You and I might not see eye-to-eye on XYZ, but darned if we can’t play Catan and fight over resources.”
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