By Priya Raman

Outdoor Life drove more than $20 million in purchases last year, but affiliate commissions of 14% to 15% left it with only a few million dollars in revenue. A new fund called eFormed Ventures, which acquired the title from Recurrent on Oct. 7 for an undisclosed sum, wants to close that gap with an AI platform named Resonance.

The deal revives a content-to-commerce model that has failed repeatedly across the media industry. The Chernin Group's bets on Food52, Hodinkee and The Pro's Closet collapsed at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs. Recurrent itself raised $300 million to build a commerce empire, then retreated from the affiliate business that powered it — and last week sold one of its most commerce-friendly brands to a buyer making the opposite bet.

Managing partner Tom Beusse, who runs eFormed alongside managing partner Mike Morford, framed the acquisition as a redirection rather than a restart. "We are not buying a commerce business that is about to start," Beusse said. "We are just directing it differently."

Who is behind eFormed Ventures?

The Bend, Oregon firm is backed by a handful of family offices, employs about 25 people, and plans to keep all of the roughly 10 Outdoor Life staffers it inherits. Its team mixes retail and outdoor-industry veterans such as Scott Blackell, formerly of Beretta and Remington, with Outdoor Life's existing editorial bench.

The leadership record is mixed. Beusse ran F+W Media until its board removed him in January 2018 after an aggressive e-commerce push; the company filed for bankruptcy the following year, according to GearJunkie. Beusse said a shortened timeline and limited capital were partly to blame.

What does the AI platform actually do?

Resonance, built over the last few years, will tailor product recommendations and pricing based on seasonality, location and shopping behavior, aiming to surface offers at more opportune times. Beusse said the AI will not touch editorial.

The company has tested the technology on the Field & Stream storefront since January under a licensing arrangement. The storefront posted triple-digit growth in that period, though Morford acknowledged it is still early.

The core logic: instead of sending readers to Amazon through affiliate links — where rates were roughly halved this spring — Outdoor Life would inspire purchases and complete them on-site, capturing a larger share of each sale.

Does the model avoid past failures?

Mark Stenberg, whose reporting for On Background identified four fault lines in Chernin's collapse, assessed each against eFormed's plan:

• Editorial-retail friction: eFormed built a team with both skill sets from the start.
• Category ceiling: the outdoor community is roughly five times the size of the golf community, per Beusse, and consumables like ammunition, tackle and apparel require repeat purchases — closer to Epic Gardening, Chernin's one clear success, than The Pro's Closet's $10,000 bikes.
• Inventory risk: eFormed will blend owned inventory with "virtual" inventory held by partner retailers, tracking sell-through rates and gross margin to keep stock from becoming a cash sink, Morford said.
• Overextended capital: as a family-office-backed holding company rather than a private equity firm, with a lean team, its overhead looks modest — though how much capital it holds and how patient its backers will be remain unknown.

Morford argued execution, not concept, caused earlier failures. "Content to commerce works for the consumer," Morford said. "Just not the businesses."

What remains unresolved?

Two questions went largely unanswered. The first is traffic: a marketplace makes each visitor more valuable but does not bring in more of them. Traffic to Outdoor Life was up 19% year over year through April, according to Recurrent, yet the search ecosystem feeding publishers is shrinking.

The second is trust. Once a publisher owns inventory, it has a financial incentive to favor what it stocks over what its testers prefer. Beusse said the Outdoor Life audience would punish that immediately, but the safeguard depends on whether editors testing gear face pressure to favor products with the highest affiliate rates.

For practitioners, the test case is straightforward: eFormed is wagering that better tools, narrower ambitions and the absence of a pandemic will succeed where Chernin and Recurrent did not. Field & Stream's triple-digit growth gives the bet an early data point, but the unknowns — capital depth, traffic, editorial independence — are the ones that killed the last wave.