Over 50 new retail accounts, placements in major big-box chains, and seven terabytes worth of raw video footage: These are a few of the things local entrepreneurs and brothers Garret and Dakota Porter brought back from the cross-country guerilla marketing tour they undertook last year.

The Porters are the founders of ActionGlow, a Traverse City-based company that makes and sells kits for outfitting snowboards, surfboards, skateboards, and other action sports gear with LED lights. So far, the Porters’ biggest claim to fame is their appearance on a November 2022 episode of the ABC reality TV show Shark Tank, where they landed a $200,000 investment from businessman and celebrity investor Robert Herjavec.

Now, the ActionGlow boys are shooting for a new “biggest claim to fame,” including a potential television series. Their 2026 road trip was the first step in that direction.

The Ticker broke the news about that trek, dubbed “the LED the Way Tour,” last January, with the brothers sharing the news their plans to take a converted a 65-passenger school bus on a months-long tour of action sports retailers and events. The Porters hit the road last April, then spent the rest of the year crisscrossing the country.

According to Dakota, the idea for the LED the Way Tour had been percolating since long before Shark Tank. The brothers grew up watching fledgling action sports companies like GoPro and Burton Snowboards find their footing thanks to cross-country tours, and always figured their road to success would involve a similar trial of miles.

“These retailers we’re trying to reach, they have so much going on that they don’t really have time to sit down and look at all the new products out there, or to pick up the phone every time someone's calling trying to get a product stocked in their location,” Dakota explains. “Having that realization opened our eyes to why this sort of grassroots sales tour was ever a thing in the past. It just makes so much sense to go out there and talk to these store owners face-to-face, so you can make a personal connection, show them the product, and tell them your story.”

Dakota and Garret bought their school bus all the way back in 2017, with plans to launch their own grassroots tour. “And man, did we underestimate the project we had in front of us,” Dakota laughs. From COVID-19 to Shark Tank, one thing after another popped up to push the trip back. Ultimately, eight years passed between the bus acquisition and the actual dawn of the LED the Way Tour.

Despite all the delays, the Porters are glad to have finally taken the trip. Over the course of eight months, they got face time with dozens of shop owners, hit the floor at major events like the CARV Expo (a San Diego trade show that draws “160+ emerging and legacy brands” in action sports), and even met some of their idols.

“We stopped at Loaded Longboards in California, which was amazing, because Dakota and I grew up riding their boards when we were 10 and 12 years old,” Garret says. “We met Chuck and Jared, the owners of Pavati, which is basically the Lamborghini of wake boats; we spent a couple days in Oregon, watching how Pavati boats are made and spending time on the water with them. And our last stop was at Burton Snowboards in Burlington, Vermont, which was really meaningful, because Burton founder Jake Carpenter was a huge inspiration for our tour. He did something very similar, loading up a Volkswagen van with his snowboards and going across the country, trying to sell snowboards before snowboarding was popular. Jake passed away a couple years ago, but his wife, Donna Carpenter, still runs the company, and we were able to meet with her and talk about how her husband inspired us.”

The Porters also scored some major business wins out on the road. Garret estimates ActionGlow “successfully landed over 50 mom-and-pop boutique shops” because of the tour. Additionally, the company now has placements with some of the biggest sports retailers in the country, including SCHEELS (a sporting goods chain with 34 stores in 16 states), Bike Mart (the Texas-based bicycle chain from which Lance Armstrong bought his first bike), and Buckman’s Ski & Snowboard Shop (which boasts seven locations and hundreds of employees in Pennsylvania). The brothers also confirm they've gotten “green lit” with REI, and are “working through all the onboarding details right now” for getting ActionGlow products carried by that outdoor recreation giant.

The success of LED the Way has Garret and Dakota planning ahead to another tour, and not just to make more retail connections. As part of last year’s trek, the brothers brought along their sales manager Jensen Diment, who documented much of the journey on film. Diment captured seven terabytes worth of footage, which the Porters are still sifting through now.

“We’re going to be releasing little episodes on YouTube, for a web series that showcases our first leg of the tour,” Dakota says. “We want to show each spot we visited and give the retail owners and areas the spotlight they deserve. The basic idea of the series is ‘Here are the fun experiences we had, here are the cool people we met, and here’s what life on the bus was like in that moment.’”

If all goes well, the web series will be a mere appetizer for more video content to come. Dakota says he and Garret are also putting together a 25-minute sizzle reel highlighting “our best stops, the best stories we heard on the road, and the best experiences we got to have traveling the country.” ActionGlow will then pitch that reel to major streaming services, in hopes of landing a proper series order.

“We’re trying to pitch basically a second leg of the tour, with the idea of going back out to our favorite stops and exploring in different locations with a full production team behind us,” Dakota says. “So, we're working with our shark partner on that right now, in hopes of properly pitching a full documentary series to Netflix, Hulu, and others.”