Kelley Student’s Retailing Career Starts at Dick’s
Lincoln Gardener
Senior; Marketing and Management
Shelbyville, Indiana
“It’s cool to turn on a football game and see 100,000 people wearing the same products that I helped purchase for Dick’s.”
Lincoln Gardner is a big sports fan, so it’s fitting that he enjoys the competitive aspects of retail—the challenge of forecasting what products people will buy and of getting customers to shop at his employer’s stores—and that his first experience in retail was with Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Gardner’s interest in retail was sparked by a presentation Dick’s gave at Kelley his junior year. He applied for an internship with the sports retailer, and the next summer he was a buying intern for NCAA licensed goods at the company’s corporate office in Pittsburgh. He helped Dick’s prepare for the college football season by figuring out which products to order for which teams, and which stores to sell them in.
His senior year, Gardner accepted a job offer from Dick’s—he will complete the company’s yearlong merchandising training program before settling into a full-time position—and took M419 Retail Strategy to broaden his retail knowledge. And throughout the fall, he got to see the results of his internship. “It’s cool to turn on a football game and see 100,000 people wearing the same products that I helped purchase for Dick’s,” he says.
