If you鈥檙e running a small to medium-sized outdoor brand today, there are so many competing forces trying to shape your business. It鈥檚 easy to freak out and be too scattered in your focus or retreat altogether and stubbornly stick to an old way of doing things.

Neither approach is workable for the long term. The landscape is getting more challenging, and success more elusive. Building an outdoor lifestyle brand you can be proud of, one that鈥檚 enduring and reflects your values, requires good partners and careful route-finding through the chaos.

Small specialty retailers have long been the literal and figurative mountain guides of our industry, the interface with the consumers, the experts on gear and trails. They validate the best gear, carry our product and brand stories to the consumer, build local communities of enthusiasts, and perpetuate the spirit of our industry. They can point you in the right direction to becoming a core, legacy brand. But you have to listen and do them service. Partnerships go both ways. After listening carefully to Wes, here鈥檚 the list I came up with for brands that want healthy long-term relationships with specialty

10 Ways Brands Can Be Better Partners to Small Specialty Retail

1. Make specialty product.

Creating real innovation, bringing it to market, and getting a new and unique story across to the customer is a tough, expensive, and risky investment. If you鈥檙e really doing something new, there鈥檚 no market research to show unequivocally that it鈥檚 going to be a success. But customers don鈥檛 visit specialty stores to see more of the same. They need to discover things they couldn鈥檛 have found much more easily on their smart phone on their couch at home. If you want a thriving partnership with specialty retail you have to create product for them that鈥檚 truly unique and special. Making truly unique and desirable product is the bedrock of success.

2. Have a point of view.

Great brands have a unique point of view and great specialty stores are thoughtfully curated ensembles of these unique voices. To build a great experience for the customer, a store assembles an assortment of products, d茅cor and culture to offer a rich and harmonious experience; each compelling brand and interesting product representing one instrument or well-played note in the orchestra. You can鈥檛 make a great symphony out of just cellos. So your brand has to stand out and contribute something special. And you can鈥檛 buy this from a creative agency鈥t has to come from the soul of your company. The good news is every brand has its own story and collection of personalities. Your identity is special, you just have to dig it up and maybe polish and tune it a bit.

3. Build an iconic and lasting brand.

Specialty retailers need enduring product franchises that give their businesses a modicum of predictability and security; brands that deliver great product and great content over and over again and pull customers through the doors. Their identity and reputation is built, in good part, from the collection of brands they carry and that bond of trust with the customer is something that takes a long time to build and an instant to destroy.

Play the long game if you want to appeal to specialty retail. If you鈥檙e publicly traded or beholden to partners seeking a two- to three-year return on investment and you鈥檙e looking to cash in on your hard-earned brand equity as you move down market in search of top line growth, understand that it will be at the cost of your small specialty relationships, and consider what you鈥檙e giving up. Wes鈥檚 store embodies the spirit of our industry and the lifestyle we have all espoused.

4. Control your discounting.

Train your customer to buy your product on sale and soon they鈥檒l never pay full price. Establish a rigorous MAP (minimum advertised price) policy, run it with an iron fist, and obey your own rules. Don鈥檛 make SMU (special make up) product for the closeout channel. Stop and think about where that鈥檚 headed鈥s your business really sustainable for the long-term on those thin margins and stripped of its aspirational qualities? One thing鈥檚 for certain, the small specialty shop can鈥檛 survive on those margins and the smart ones won鈥檛 try to compete in that rarified environment鈥hey鈥檒l just shut you out.

5. Take the time to sit with and listen to your partners and visit their stores.

It struck me how interconnected and yet different my daily universe is with Wes鈥檚. You鈥檝e had the same thought when you visited your factories鈥hey make your products and yet your worldview is so divergent. Get out there and visit retail. I think you鈥檒l find they sell your stuff, but have a whole different set of challenges and perspectives. If it鈥檚 an especially important account, establish a communication pipeline between the principals.

Sunlight Sports Branded Swag

Sunlight Sports branded notebooks

Sunlight Sports branded bottles

Sunlight Sports co-branded cups

Sunlight also brands hats and tee-shirts

6. Help your partners build their own brand.

Remember that your retailers, the best ones anyway, have their own brands. Respect that their shop has a point of view and identity in the community, a look and feel they have carefully developed and must carefully steward. The storytelling of your fixture program or latest marketing campaign may not fit into the story they鈥檙e trying to tell. At the end of the day, it鈥檚 their orchestra to conduct and the audience will walk out happiest if you just focus on playing your own instrument well.

7. Be transparent.

Don鈥檛 try to sneak things in like influencer programs. It鈥檚 a very flat world we live in today in terms of information. Everyone has astonishing access to everything. Assume you can get away with absolutely nothing. Besides, operating with integrity is always the best long-term play. Come through on your promises. Don鈥檛 change the rules in the middle of the game. Sudden floating mark-down windows, unacknowledged exclusive programs, or changes in distribution mid-stream burn your loyal specialty partners.

8. Have a great website and sell your own products direct.

Wes surprised me on this. He pointed out that these days consumers use their smart phones to do research on the store floor. Your website can be an important component in completing a sale. The key is that you follow your own MAP policy. If the customer clicks to your site and sees a discount in exchange for an email signup, Wes loses a sale. But if they see a great site with wonderful storytelling and everything at full price, with additional technical information and product reviews, you鈥檝e added something to the selling process for Wes and his crew.

9. Seek critical feedback.

This applies not just to your relationships with your retailers, but internally too. Ask what you can be doing better. The world is moving fast. You have to constantly seek good updated intelligence and pivot to stay on course. There is no immutable formula for success.

10. Be choosy when you pick your partners.

Don鈥檛 ship to every account that will sell you鈥攍ike the hardware store down the street. Curation should go both ways. Pick partners that flatter your brand. For example, says Wes, being in Urban Outfitters is great. They鈥檙e making outdoors part of mainstream culture and they鈥檙e portraying it as aspirational. That grows the community of outdoor enthusiasts. But the dispassionate big box store, the faceless online retailer that copy/pastes all your content and gives back nothing to the community, the multifarious country store that shoves a few of your products in the back corner for travelers who forget something at home? Not so much.

Whether these tenets鈥攁nd the ones outlined in my previous article鈥攁re spot-on or not, they are certainly not an exhaustive list. There鈥檚 a lot more, big and small, that makes a shop or a brand thrive these days.

Most of all, it requires passion and conviction. Wes and Melissa aren鈥檛 running a specialty shop because there鈥檚 nothing else they could be doing with their lives. They鈥檙e doing it because they love it. And that applies to me, and making NEMO gear, too. Passion, plus a little grit and hunger for knowledge, can carry you a long way and make you pretty resilient, even in an ever-flattening, hyper-competitive and fast-evolving world.

The Retail Immersion Project is an ongoing OBJ initiative that bridges the gap between outdoor brands and specialty retail by imbedding C-level executives onto the sales floor. By sharing these stories, our goal is to create dialogue that raises important issues and ultimately to work toward solutions that create a healthier outdoor industry.聽

The post The Retail Immersion Project: 10 Ways Brands Can Be Better Partners to Their Retailers appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

It鈥檚 been at least ten years since I鈥檝e been a proper outdoor consumer. I fell in love with ice climbing鈥攁nd about a dozen other outdoor pursuits鈥攚hen I was a freshman in college in 1994. I spent pretty much every spare dollar I had for the next decade assembling my stash of backpacking gear. By the time I started NEMO in 2002, I had only a few dollars in the bank, but I had built myself a versatile kit that was ready for any adventure.

I have always been a gearhead. I kept a hand-written gear list and when I had some money saved, I would drive to Outdoor Gear Exchange in Burlington, Vermont, or International Mountain Equipment in North Conway, New Hampshire. I would consult with the staff, carefully deliberate the specs, then add another Camalot or ice screw to my rack. Between my weekend climbing, my weeknights at the rock gym, and so many visits to OGX and IME, I was a very engaged part of the outdoor industry ecosystem. I was part of the climbing culture, I drove a Subaru wagon, and I could use terms like 鈥渂eta鈥� and 鈥渟end it!鈥� without feeling like an impostor.

When 国产吃瓜黑料 Business Journal editor-in-chief Kristin Hostetter reached out to and asked if I would be interested in an immersive experience in a retail shop, I said yes right away. There鈥檚 a lot of talk about the future of brick and mortar versus online, and small specialty versus big box, and as with everything today, you can find an article or a talking head to support just about anything you want to believe. I wanted to see firsthand a successful small specialty store in action, and I knew exactly who to call.

The first time I walked through the doors of Sunlight Sports in Cody, Wyoming, it struck me immediately as exhibit-like in its curation. It was a bright, sunny morning and my eyes took a moment to adjust, but my nose did not: that classic familiar campfire scent hung in the air. (A stroke of brilliance: sunlight uses a product called Scent::Linq to recreate that wonderfully unmistakable smell.)

There was, front and center, a campfire scene with a circle of chairs around a mock fire pit with an illuminated flickering bandanna of fabric at the center. An outer radius of tents equipped with bags and pads, formed a believable backcountry scene inside the cozy shop. Behind that, a central wedge of stairs rose to an upper-level mezzanine that wrapped the store, dividing and organizing the space into a logical framework.

I was excited to spend the next three days there working alongside the owner, Wes Allen, and his staff. My plan was to interact with customers, observe the daily challenges, then over beers each night brainstorm with Wes about how his customers have evolved over the years and how brands and specialty stores can cooperate to stay relevant in a fast-changing world. My ultimate goal with Wes was to come up with a list of best practices for us, and hopefully other specialty retailers and brands, to follow to keep ourselves relevant in this fast-changing consumer landscape.

The Retail Immersion Project is an OBJ initiative that bridges the gap between outdoor brands and specialty retail by imbedding C-level executives onto the sales floor. By sharing these stories, our goal is to create dialogue that raises important issues and ultimately to work toward solutions that create a healthier outdoor industry.聽

The post The Retail Immersion Project: Cam Brensinger & Sunlight Sports appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.