HAMMOND || The third-largest city in the nation and Indiana's legions of outdoor enthusiasts create the "perfect storm" for marketing the Hammond Cabela's, according to the outdoor outfitter's marketing chief.

"We can pick up that great mass of people from Chicago and then go south of here and there it's that hard-core outdoor hunting crowd," said Tom Rosdail, Cabela's vice president of marketing.

Rosdail spoke Friday about the marketing approach for the Cabela's Hammond store, seated in it deli-style restaurant, on the same day Cabela's was opening another store in East Hartford, Conn.

Those are the 22nd and 23rd U.S. stores for the company, which made its reputation with mail-order catalogs starting in the early 1960s.

It is those catalogs, 135 million sent out each year, which continue to create Cabela's huge customer base, according to spokesman Kari Blankenship.

"We have our core customers, our hunting and fishing people, men and women, they are very aware of what's going on at our stores, because they have been getting these catalogs for years," Blankenship said.

Each store contains 175,000 separate items, with the catalogs offering more than 200,000.

Just as important as the number of items, is the people selling them, Blankenship said.

In the fly-fishing section, for example, sales personnel are fishing enthusiasts. The same in the gun library and other sections.

The goal is to create the same loyalty and trust in the stores as is true of the company's catalog business, she said.

"It's hard to know what companies to trust nowadays," Blankenship said. "But by trial and error, our customers have learned they can trust us."