If you have been following Alaska Bear Spray Rental, or you have read through any of our existing blog posts, then you would know that we are somewhat of a young company. The company was officially started at the end of 2024 and really didn’t have our first full season until 2025 (last year). It was an incredible year for us that exceeded all of our expectations and also provided us with some great learning opportunities to fine-tune operations in 2026 to improve things even more.
The Great Estimate!
One thing you learn when you start a new business is humility. You go into it thinking you know everything and have it all figured out but the market quickly humbles you, in a positive way, to let you know that you really didn’t know EVERYTHING. You come up with these great plans of how things are going to flow, but you eventually find out that they were all based on estimates of how the market will react. That was me in 2025 and I am happy to announce that we have pivoted in 2026 to make everything flow smoother and to improve the customer experience. Everyone at Alaska Bear Spray Rental is super excited about these changes so I thought I would share them with you…
Changes and Improvements for 2026
Working to build off of an incredible inaugural year, we have made the following changes:
Immediate Pickups
I will be the first person to admit that our process in 2025 that required a 48 hour advance notice on any orders was flawed. It made perfectly logical sense to us in absence of reality when we were planning everything but this was very inconsistent from what customers actually wanted. A lot of people hadn’t thought about needing bear spray until they arrived in Alaska and a 48 hour delay on being able to pickup your order didn’t support most customers. Many of you called us and we tried our best to accommodate as many of you as we could but it was obvious that our process needed to change going forward. I am happy to announce that it has! You can literally place your order on our website and pick it up 10 seconds later at any of our pickup locations. We hope that this single change alone will make the entire rental process so much easier and more convenient for everyone.
Multiple Language Support
Another reality that we completely missed last year was that many of our visitors to Alaska are from other countries and English isn’t their primary language. We actually had the pleasure of speaking with several people in 2025 that were visiting from overseas and helped them acquire bear spray from our website. We realized, however, that we needed to make our website more friendly to our international visitors by making it a multi-language website. We have implemented this change and the website now supports English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. We will also be adding additional languages in the future as we are able to get everything translated. Our goal is to have the website support the languages of at least the top-10 international visitors that come to Alaska.
Multiple Pickup/Drop-off Locations
We are Alaska Bear Spray Rental and not just Anchorage Bear Spray Rental. Yes, a lot of people travel in/out of Anchorage but we need to have more pickup and drop-off locations in the state. We are actively working to improve this offering. At the time of this article we still only have the one location in Anchorage, but we have more locations in the works and will be announcing these individually as they come online. We fully intend to live up to our name and be Alaska’s bear spray rental company.
Beyond 2026…
I am sure there are many things we will learn from 2026 that we will need to adjust in 2027. That is one of the great joys and struggles of owning a business. To truly be a servant of your customers and try to serve them well, you need to be continuously learning and adapting to their needs. I hope that I am able to continue to do that as we move forward but I am somewhat humbly amazed as how a website that offers one product could do so well and keep me busy. If you are a customer reading this and you have made it this far in the article, thank you! We promise to continue to do the best we can to offer you our one product – bear spray.
Be safe!
