Potatoes, a hardware store and a dropped letter.

Scheels began as a hardware business, not a sports store. InForum, the Fargo news site, reported on 6 May 2026 that the brand began in 1902 as a small hardware business in Sabin, Minnesota. The company’s own history gives the founding story in more detail. It says the German immigrant Frederick A. Scheele moved to Sabin with his wife, Augusta, and their two children, that the family planted potatoes on a small plot of land, and that money from their first harvest paid the down payment on a hardware and general merchandise store. The company says he then dropped the final “e” from the family name, which became Scheel — the spelling the stores still carry.

The company history traces the business through the family. It says his son, Frederick M. Scheel, took over after returning from service in the U.S. Navy in the First World War, by which time the store also sold groceries and farm equipment; that the business bought a hardware store in Moorhead, Minnesota, between 1927 and 1930 and soon expanded into North Dakota, including Fargo; and that the next generation, the brothers Fred B. and Charles Scheel, opened more stores in North Dakota, Minnesota and Montana after the Second World War. English Wikipedia says the company began adding a small selection of sporting goods in 1954 and that Fargo became the corporate headquarters.

The shift from hardware to sport came gradually. The company says its stores began to offer athletic shoes and clothing in 1972, and that Steve D. Scheel, Fred B. Scheel’s son, pressed for a wider choice of sporting goods at its Sioux Falls store, which by 1980 had converted entirely to sporting goods. In 1989, the company says, it opened its first “All Sports Superstore” in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The hardware side survived for decades in a single shop. The company says that when a new sporting-goods store was built in Fargo in 1994, the older Fargo store returned to selling only hardware, and it later became Scheels Home & Hardware. InForum reported in May 2026 that this south Fargo store, described as the brand’s last remaining hardware store, would close at the end of 2026.

Employee ownership and a new generation of stores.

Ownership changed in 1991. The company says Scheels converted from family ownership to an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP, that year, and InForum described Scheels in 2026 as an employee-owned company, quoting a statement that said the board had considered the long-term health of the business for its “employee-owners”. The same report quoted Matt Hanson with the title “chief employee owner”. The company’s history says Hanson, who started as a part-time cashier at its Mankato, Minnesota, store, became chief executive in 2024, when Steve M. Scheel, a great-great-grandson of the founder, retired.

Family members led the company through the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The company says Steve D. Scheel became president and chief executive in 1989 and later chairman, and that Steve M. Scheel became president in 2006 and chief executive in 2015. The Grand Forks Herald reported on 6 September 2011 that Steve M. Scheel, then the company’s president, announced at a press conference in the Grand Forks store — standing in front of a backdrop covered with Scheels logos — that the store would move into the former Target space at Columbia Mall, with an opening planned for the autumn of 2014. Wikipedia says the store moved to Columbia Mall in 2014.

The stores themselves grew into destinations. The company says that in 1998 Steve D. Scheel set out to make Scheels a destination rather than only a retailer, and that stores began to feature attractions, starting with a centrepiece tree in its Iowa City store. It says the first store with a Scheels Ferris wheel opened in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2004, and that its Sparks, Nevada, store introduced a walk-through aquarium. The Dallas Morning News reported on 31 January 2018 that Fargo-based Scheels was building a store in The Colony, Texas, which it described as both a sporting-goods store and an entertainment destination, with a Ferris wheel and a saltwater aquarium; the company says the store opened in 2020.

Design and documentation.

A sporting-goods store is read from the car park before it is read from the shelf. The fascia carries the name in letters large enough to register from a moving vehicle, so retail marks in this field tend toward heavy, wide letterforms, simple outlines and a colour that survives being lit from behind at night. Inside, the job of the identity changes. Departments such as footwear, team sports, fitness, camping, fishing and hunting need hanging signs and aisle markers that work from across a large floor, and the type on them usually follows a stricter, more neutral system than the fascia, so the shopper notices the category before the brand.

Displays carry much of the mood. Product walls, mannequins in seasonal kit, trial areas for shoes or bikes and lodge-style fixtures in outdoor departments all tell a visitor what kind of trip or game the store is preparing them for. Private labels add a further layer: a retailer’s own lines of apparel, footwear or equipment often get their own names, logos and colour palettes, designed to sit beside national brands on the same rail without being mistaken for them. A guide for a store brand can cover the exterior sign, the wayfinding system, the fixtures and the house labels together.

A family name, written in capitals.

The Scheels identity rests on a family surname that the founder adjusted himself. According to the company, Frederick A. Scheele dropped the final “e” after buying the Sabin store, and the shortened name is the basis of the one the chain still uses. On its website and in its own history, the company writes the name in capital letters, as SCHEELS, and the Grand Forks Herald described a press-conference backdrop in 2011 covered with Scheels logos.

The interiors carry as much of the identity as the sign. The company describes its larger stores as destinations, and press reports have described their attractions: the Dallas Morning News on the Ferris wheel and saltwater aquarium planned for The Colony, and Wikipedia, citing the Kansas City Business Journal, on an aquarium and Ferris wheel planned for the Overland Park, Kansas, store that opened in 2015. The company also lists a partnership with Fuzziwig’s Candy Factory, which it says began in its Springfield, Illinois, store in 2017 and later spread to more locations.

Scheels also has a house label. Wikipedia describes Scheels Outfitters as a brand exclusive to Scheels, covering gear for fishing, hunting and shooting, and the company maintains a Scheels Outfitters section on its website. The employee-ownership structure is part of the brand language as well: InForum quoted the company’s leader in 2026 under the title “chief employee owner”.

For a design guide, Scheels shows how a family name can carry a business from hardware and groceries to large sports stores, with the change of category told through interiors and attractions rather than through a new name. Compare it with REI, a member-owned outdoor retailer, and Bass Pro Shops, whose stores are also built as destinations. For this guide we use barn red, harvest tan and prairie white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Scheels’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.