Stone Climbing Co.
Jacksonville, Florida
Specs: Eric Hires began climbing when he was 16 years old at the original Vertical Ventures in Tampa, Florida, and has remained a lifelong climber. While studying business at Flagler College in St. Augustine, he worked on a climbing gym project for an entrepreneurship class. His team wrote a business plan, created a logo and a website, and conducted some market research. At the semester’s end, local business leaders even selected their project for investment. Hires initially pursued a different career path but frequently revisited the idea of a climbing gym. “I kept coming back to the climbing gym,” he said. “I would bust out the old business plan, dust it off, and start looking at buildings and spaces.” Financial concerns delayed progress, but in 2018, after getting engaged and thinking more about the future, he revisited the plan more seriously. Seeking to work with an investor who was also a climber, Hires struggled to find the right fit until a friend texted him a photo of a napkin with Dr. John Thousand’s name and phone number and the note that he was interested in opening a gym in St. Augustine, too, and wanted to connect. “He understood the vision of what I was trying to do,” Hires said of Dr. Thousand. “So we partnered up, and that was the big missing puzzle piece to move forward.”
In 2021, the pair opened their first climbing gym in St. Augustine, Florida. Hires said the gym was well received, which validated their concept. Seeing an opportunity to serve more folks in the region, they decided to plan a second location in Jacksonville, 45 minutes north of the first location. “We saw other gym chains from out of state coming into Florida and building gyms,” Hires said. “It was only a matter of time before someone built another gym in Jacksonville.”
Both the Stone Climbing Co. locations are ground-up builds. In Jacksonville, the team explored existing buildings but found none that fit their vision. Instead, they secured a centrally located site near the University of North Florida. “Just looking at the land that was available, this seemed to be the best fit,” Hires added. Learning from their first build, they made a point to incorporate some design improvements into the plan, such as better retail storage placement, a dedicated hold storage room, and an indoor hold washing station for routesetters. The Jacksonville gym will also include a mezzanine for programming events, yoga, and birthday parties, plus a board training room overlooking the climbing area. Additional features will include a fitness center, a recovery zone with a sauna, and a cold bath.
Hires believes a key differentiator for Stone Climbing is the business’s focus on aesthetics. During the St. Augustine build, “We took extra time and money to have big art installations above our climbing walls,” Hires said. Artist Matthew Batty used objects he had found around St. Augustine—shells, rocks, shark teeth and alligator heads—to create vinyl prints. They plan to collaborate with Batty again to ensure the Jacksonville gym has similarly unique, artistic design elements. “We didn’t want to build a bland utilitarian rectangle,” Hires stated. “We wanted to make something beautiful.”
Walls: Vertical Solutions
Flooring: Habit
CRM Software: Approach
Website: stoneclimbing.com
Instagram: @StoneClimbingCo
In Their Words: “They say it’s going to be more expensive, take longer, and be harder than you think it is. That’s not to deter anyone, but it’s especially more expensive. I thought I had put an ample cushion in my budget based on our first build for this one, and it still was more expensive than I originally had budgeted…We financed both with SBA loans. There are a lot of pros and cons to SBA programs. It’s great for starting out and getting your foot in the door without having as much of a down payment, but there are also a lot of hidden fees within those programs. So, in the future, if we do another project, I’m definitely going to try and do it [with] more of a conventional loan.” – Eric Hires, Stone Climbing Co. Co-Owner
